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

by Steven Pressfield

  Theseus well comprehended these savage tenets and tendered warning to my father, speaking apart in the aftercourse of his interview with Selene, that she, driven now by a mandate superseding that pledge which held her in indenture, might claim her release or even seize it by her own hand. Father understood this as well. Both men were aware of the imperative held by all warrior races to serve honor before survival. This too might impel Selene to run.

  We children divined this as well and more, intimates of our governess. We knew the romance which bound our king to the Amazon Antiope, who had fought at his side in the Great Battle. Perhaps the king yet loved Antiope, long perished as she was, or feared the magic of Eleuthera, who bore the war name of the Scythians, Molpadia, “Death Song.” Our girls’ eyes never left the monarch, seeking in his demeanor some hint of heartsoreness, which we thought we detected, unaware of its actual source. Nor did the youths of the farm, restrained by their own diffidence from approaching, dare bespeak the king in such frank manner as the governess. We could see them mutter to one another as men will. “What’s she got, that wild bitch, that sets her so high and mighty over us?”

  They hated Selene before, and more now, so that this night, after the king’s party had departed, the bucks came for Selene in her kennel, a bark lean-to alongside the room I shared with my sister, and dragged her forth to the dark. When Europa and I made to scream, Selene fixed us with a glare that commanded our silence, which she herself would maintain, we knew, and bear mute all the men would do, though we flew anyway to Father and Mother, but neither would come at once, though we implored them, knowing the ravagement of person being inflicted on Selene with each moment’s delay. Father believed that on the farm, as on a ship, the hands sometimes may not be ruled but must work out their malice, and him or her judged most outcast must bear the toll. I hated my father in that hour. Perhaps he too feared Selene’s flight yet knew not how to quell it, or felt his mastery of her failing or proving false. He departed to her rescue indeed, but absent haste.

  Mother held Europa and me from following, and, tugging us to her breast, made to account. “Selene is not a person as you or I, children, but a wild creature who may bear that which to a human being would be intolerable.”

  “Do you mean she may be violated, as drakes in a gang assault a duck?” This my sister demanded and received a blow for her insolence.

  Mother restrained us long enough for the men to work their evil: then, Father reappearing, with a look released us. We understood we might tend Selene now, and flew to her.

  Men gave it out that what came later was payout for the way she was shamed, or grief at the news she had borne. It was neither. For one of her race, who had surrendered and served, no further shame was possible, nor was grief grounds for vengeance but only altare, union with the fallen, as the Amazons call it in their tongue.

  Selene did not run away that night. Rather she called Europa and me apart, to that plane copse where she had schooled us in silence, and over three nights imparted to us her history. When an Amazon senses the hour of her death approaching—when wounded or ill, say, or on the eve of some battle before which she has received a vision or sign of her impending end—the law of her race commands her to “make her testament.” She gathers her daughters and imparts her chronicle. Such account, Selene conveyed to us, rarely takes form as a narration of events, but may contain as much of visions and dreams as of waking adventure.

  These annals Selene now delivered to us, as I this night pass them on to you. She told of her childhood upon the eastern steppe; of the arrival by sea of Theseus twenty years past; how the king had won the heart of Antiope, war queen of Amazonia, and fled with her to Athens. Selene told of the fury of the Amazons and of the marshaling, beneath Eleuthera, of their own clans, reinforced by the male tribes of the plains, Scyths and Maeotians, Thracians and Tower People, Massa Getai and Thyssa Getai, and fifty other nations, and of this army’s three-month trek west and assault upon our city. These wonders Selene narrated with such unwonted urgency as to strike my sister and me with dread (for why would she offer her testament unless she was preparing to die?) yet we were bound to silence by our love for her and the awe in which we held her.

  On the third night she led us apart to that toppled wall we children called the Viper’s Pocket and there, inserting her arm to the shoulder within a cleft, felt about and withdrew a stone adder, the serpent yet torpid with the night chill, whose poison the Amazons employ to produce that state called in their tongue adraneia, “no turning back.” Clamping the snake behind the neck, Selene set its nostrils adjacent her calf. She uttered no cry, nor moved, as the fangs entered her flesh and she struck off the head with her sickle. Her blade prized apart the snake’s jaws and extracted the fangs, deep as the joint of a thumb. She sang:

  Kallos beauty, orge wrath,

  Heart speaks but none listen

  Save we on this path.

  Now look you there, daughters and granddaughters, beneath the moon, to that drystone wall which yokes the shearing pens to the gate of the lane.

  From there, on the noon succeeding that night, Selene came mounted on my father’s stallion, which she had stolen from its stall moments before. Between the steed’s jaws set the golden bit of Selene’s bridle; on her forearm rode the war shield of bearskin and black leopard. She whipped the beast to the gallop, while the boys and men of the farm raced in a gang to cut her off.

  Scyllus the goatherd Selene drove through with the flung javelin, there before the wall, striking him in the solar plexus with the full force of her throw, enlarged by the horse’s rising moment so that the herdsman did not even stagger but was nailed, as a plank beneath the joiner’s mawl, against the boards of the gate, slain before his mouth could gape or arm ascend to direct the alarm.

  With the bow Selene slew Dracon the foreman, there beside the spring’s hollow, and at a gallop leapt the wall, loosing a second shaft as she flew, which took the boy Memnon square in the throat, slicing voice box through and severing the column which supports the weight of the skull, so that he dropped like a sack of stones, life-fled before his carcass hit the dirt. And here Mentor, called Top Hand, who had abused Selene most brutally and handled her most with contempt, seeing her vault wall and palisade and bear down hard upon him, wheeled to flee.

  Now from the Amazon’s throat, which had endured so long in mute forbearance, ascended that war cry which even to recall at the remove of years sends the gooseflesh coursing, and, snatching the woodsman’s hatchet she bore in the stead of a battle-axe in the brace across her shoulders, she slung this weapon upon her fleeing prey at a dead run, its warhead whistling end over end to fix him between the shoulder blades and plunge a full hand’s breadth deep into sinew and bone. The force of the blow drove the brute face-foremost into the dirt, where he struck and bounced, arms neither flung wide in agony nor extended before him to break the fall but hanging slack at his sides, and slid upon his chest as a stone skipped across a pond, to skid crown-first into the wattle underpan of the sows’ trough, dead as a rat and as void of locomotion.

  Selene’s mount’s hooves thundered past and, strewing straw as she heeled him hard over, slewed round the corner and raced away up the slope, trampling the grafted vines which had been staked out just that forenoon. She vanished beneath the olives of the rise, leaving naught but hoof-punched dust to drift and settle, punctuating her flight.

  2

  ELEUTHERA MEANS

  FREEDOM

  Two nights later I woke to find my sister flown. I knew at once she had fled to follow Selene. The transom beneath the eaves was our accustomed escape (as our little room had no window and no outer door); in moments I was up and over, barefoot, and away into the woods.

  There must have been fifty hiding places employed by Europa and me, to any of which she could have flown, yet my feet bore me toward that plane grove, our academy of silence, where Selene sacrificed a dove to the moon at each solstice. Once in winter when I had stamped there with the co
ld, our governess had made Europa and me (for one may not be scourged apart from the other) stand nightlong in frost so hard we lost sensation to the waist. I crested the slope now, lungs heaving, only to have a blow unseen cut my feet from beneath me. I plunged, on my back in my nightshirt, to discover a form atop my chest and a blade at my throat.

  “Who has followed you?”

  It was Europa. She was naked. Dark as it was, I could see three slashes carved in echelon into the flesh of her breast. This was the matrikon, the ritual self-mutilation practiced by the Amazons on the eve of battle.

  “What have you done to yourself?” I cried.

  My sister’s horse Redhead waited, laden with kit.

  “You mean to track Selene!”

  Europa hissed me silent. “Why did you follow, Bones?” (This is the name I was called as a child, for the dearth of meat on my frame.)

  “Take me with you!” I begged.

  Europa had mounted to the crown of the slope and held there, motionless, listening. At last satisfied that no one had tracked me, she skidded down and again seized me by the wrist. “There, feel it?”

  She thrust my hand between her legs.

  “I bleed woman’s blood.”

  The hair stood erect over all my body. My sister’s first moon flow. She was a woman now. I could see from the churned earth that she had been dancing. She turned from me in a state of exaltation and elevated both arms toward the moon, which was her namesake, Europa “Broad Face,” as it was Selene’s “Full Moon.” Her breath steamed upon the air. I marveled to behold her in this transport, impaled in ecstasy upon that shaft which lanced silver between the trees.

  “Take me with you, sister!”

  “You must keep this secret. You heard the men today!”

  Indeed at dawn this day Europa and I had trekked into the city to the site of the Assembly and there watched from the peuke copse at the brow of the Pnyx (along with other children, slaves, and women debarred by law from deliberations of policy) as the men debated Selene’s fate and what action to take regarding her crime and flight.

  Outrage had been fierce and immediate in the wake of the farmyard massacre. Before the blood of the slain had dried, their male kin had been sent for, while the dames swarmed about their slaughtered sons and husbands, wailing in woe and horror. Bring horses and weapons! Muster a posse! Father was appointed captain. My sister and I could see him stall. As an hour slipped away, and another, in the marshaling and provisioning and assigning of arms, the zeal for pursuit abated. Common sense told the futility of launching after Selene. Who could overhaul the Amazon, who had the postnoon’s start and gained more with each hour? Selene would run her mount till it dropped, then steal another and another, while the company on her trail must trade for or purchase fresh animals, through a country already made disgruntled by its prey’s passage, nor could an armed party pass through alien states absent permission of their princes. Theseus himself did not wish to make a case of this, when his ministers informed him of it later that day, reckoning other affairs of state of far more pressing urgency, namely the increasing boldness of certain barons, agitating for independence from the crown, not to say their allies in the Assembly, who sensed, perhaps, a slackening in Theseus’ support among the people and sought to exploit this for their own advantage.

  The day passed, and another. Rage at Selene moderated, succeeded by grief for the slain and a darker sense, never absent among superstitious country folk, of a god’s hand in the play. Perhaps heaven had willed this holocaust. Surely the dead could make no claim to blamelessness. And their kin, however passionately they may have wished for revenge, were poor men with few resources and less influence.

  And so all sought to put from mind this unhappy episode, the running-amok of an obscure and doubtless half-mad governess. But one man, Lykos, the son of Pandion, who was brother to Theseus’ father Aegeus and felt himself cheated of Athens’s throne, hated Theseus and bore him malice for this and other ills long past. Lykos perceived in the event of Selene’s crime and flight the chance to work evil to his enemy. So he set himself to inflame the people, declaring in assembly that such lawlessness unpunished would inspire further mischief—not the harmless outlawry of boys or men but that of women, most pernicious and foul. This struck a chord. For what husband or householder—Lykos incited the males of the Assembly—may close both eyes in sleep, when tame governesses sling fatal darts and fly unscourged to alien lands?

  The orator recalled to his hearers that epoch, so few generations past, when fathers could not even name their own sons with certainty, such was the promiscuity of women. Here at Athens our king Cecrops had founded the institution of marriage, by which the unchaste nature of the female was at last governed and the rights of property accession, father to son, established in accordance with heaven’s will.

  “How scandalous, men of Athens, if our city, where God first bound female to male in holy matrimony, should be the site of this ordinance’s overthrow. Here too did divine Demeter first tutor man in bringing forth the bounties of the earth. To our fathers she taught cultivation of the soil and husbandry of animals, by which arts, shared by us freely with all humankind, has the race of men elevated itself from the slough. Here our fathers founded the twin pillars of civilization—agriculture and monogamy. Will we, their sons, permit both to perish? Let this wild woman get away with murder,” Lykos railed, “and we might as well strike the city and return with her to cleft and mire!”

  The Assembly met then as now outdoors on the hill of the Pnyx, presided over by Theseus, and from this vantage Lykos gestured to the quarters south, west, and north, recalling to his countrymen the siege of the state, only one generation past.

  “Have you forgotten so soon, men of Athens? Let me remind you, then, of that hour when the hordes of Amazonia made their camp on the very stones upon which we convene today and kindled for their cookfires the timbers of our homes, which they and their savage allies had razed entire, driving us before their host in terror. Nor did the ranks of the foe stand slender or attenuated, but in depth twenty shields, with battalions of male auxiliaries, wild Scythians and Thracians and Issedonians, Black Cloaks and Tower People, Massa Getai and Thyssa Getai, painted Tralliai and screw-maned Strymonians, archers and slingers as well as armored infantry, and cavalry above thirty thousand. Nor could we repair to our estates, gentlemen, for the army of Amazons had captured all, laying waste the countryside from Eleusis to Acharnae, while we ourselves starved and rationed water, huddled on the Acropolis behind a palisade of timber and stone. Have you disremembered, men of Athens? Has this little scrape escaped your recall?”

  Lykos called on Theseus to mount a pursuit of the Amazon Selene by a fleet and army. He so agitated the people that they stood upon the instant of approving a motion to pursue the fugitive all the way to the Black Sea if necessary, exacting vengeance not on her alone but whatever remained of her race, wiping them out at last and for all time.

  Our king rose upon his hobbled leg. The herald set the speaker’s skeptron in his hand.

  “Men of Athens,” Theseus began, “I stand in awe of this demonstration of spirit. Would that the commonwealth could call upon such zeal in all her perils. Yet you will acquit me, I hope, if I detect within our speaker’s fervor a subtler and more duplicitous scheme. What do you care for this issue, Lykos? I daresay you would not part with a parsnip for the sake of this female Selene or the victims of her wrath, none of whom you could even name before yesterday.” The king indicated his president’s throne. “You’d like this seat, wouldn’t you, Lykos? Or failing that, the satisfaction of ousting me from it? Lykos! Your name means Wolf and like a wolf you stalk me.”

  Murmurs greeted this, and cries from both parties.

  “What I shall do about this wild woman,” Theseus resumed, “I know not yet. But I know what I will not do. I will not pursue her across oceans. Not from fear of rivals, however skilled in their manipulation of their countrymen’s passions, but because it is simply no
t worth it. I will not elevate the moment of this lamentable homicide by my participation in the pursuit of its instrument.”

  Theseus set forth an alternative. If Lykos craved so fervently the capture of this savage maid, let him lead the party in person. The state would foot the bill, declared Theseus, and he himself would donate twenty battle mounts, trained and tractable for sea transport. “Name your ships and men, Lykos, and I will fund them. If you return with your prize, may all glory redound to you.”

  It was with no slender amusement that Europa and I, not to say the Assembly entire, played witness to Lykos’ recitation of alibis to duck this chore. He retreated beneath a storm of derision. The Assembly adjourned.

  Now at midnight in the plane grove, my sister dressed and drew her riding cloak about her; she took Redhead’s reins and moved to mount. “Do you remember Selene’s testament?” she addressed me.

  Of course I did. I could recite it by heart.

  “And her story of Eleuthera’s warrior oath?”

  Of course.