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

by Steven Pressfield

  The appearance of the Amazons and Scyths changed that overnight. Beneath the lash of terror, men bricked up alleys and shuttered lanes, threw up breastworks and erected battlements. Brawls broke out over where the new wall should stand, each boroughman seeking to preserve his own kennel while lobbying for the demolition of his neighbor’s. Theseus’ officers, myself among them, must draft the line. Brick this house up. Tear that one down. Fields of fire had to be cleared. An open space must be made outside the wall or the foe would simply mount from the contiguous rooftops and overrun us. Stones and timbers were recruited from the razed homes and used to reinforce the spared, which now fused beneath the mason’s trowel and mortarman’s hod into a rampart of bricks and rubble and timber, wicker and stone and hides, with stacked baskets of sand atop the rooves, manned by every able-bodied buck, urchin, dame, and pensioner who could scrabble up a ladder and pull it up after him. The outer suburbs were left to the foe; the town and city would be defended to the death.

  The permanent walls of Athens were two: the Lykomid or Outer Wall, which embraced the full circuit of the city (but not the town), and the Half Ring, the monumental bastion protecting the Acropolis itself. Both were double walls with sallyports at intervals. At the western base of the Rock squatted a system of defense works called the Enneapylon, the Nine Gates. These were courtyard-type bulwarks, one behind the other; they defended the Acropolis on its least severe and most vulnerable flank, directly beneath the Three Hundred Steps. The inner wall was called the Half Ring because it enclosed only the western waist of the Rock. No battlements protected the faces east and north. These were unscalable.

  The Rock itself was walled massively at the summit by those great stoneworks called “the Fortress.” Eleven towers studded this circuit, each sited to provide covering fire for the towers on its flanks. Embrasures for bowmen notched the circumference, with an additional forty-seven artillery ports, the “beaten zones” of whose drop ramps covered every quadrant by which the citadel could be assailed. Within the Rock the central cistern, the Deep Spring, captured drinking water year-round; steps ran down to it broad enough for two water bearers to pass abreast. Stockpiles of grain could hold out thirty-six months. Nor was there any shortage of stone to hurl down upon the foe, and if there were, the defenders would break apart the Rock itself to extract more. Theseus’ chief of artillery, a transplanted Thracian named Olorus, estimated that with all forty-seven ports firing, gunners atop the Acropolis could dump thirty tons a minute, with a fall of between ninety and a hundred and forty feet. This was moot for the moment, however, as the city and its dwellings squatted directly in the path of such a barrage.

  I had found Selene, among a unit (or “stick,” as the Amazons call them) in the suburbs south of Coele, and would call to her across the lines. It heartened me tremendously to see her, despite the malevolence of her people’s designs and her own manifest enthusiasm for them. I saw that she had steeled herself against all tender feeling toward me, yet, will you believe it, I felt confident I could overcome this if given the chance. As for my own feelings, I loved her with all my heart, more even than in Amazonia. Was this madness? I knew only that the malaise that had borne me down for two years, since the expedition’s return from the Amazon Sea, had dispelled like magic at the sight not only of my beloved but of the women’s army entire. Life had begun again. Though I might perish defending the nation, and in fact fully expected to, I felt not downcast but exhilarated.

  Selene herself was in high spirits. All the Amazons were. They were taking the suburbs block by block and leveling them. They scorned our chockablock cottages and coops. “How can you live in these pestholes?” The warrioresses would yoke a team to a lintel and send a housefront crashing. “There, now you can breathe!”

  The Amazons hated every doghouse of the metropolis. While the Scyths looted for trophies and plunder, the daughters of Ares seemed bent on eradicating the city entire. They tore up paving stones and razed pediments to the nub. Nor were their depredations confined to Attica. Selene vacated for ten days, fighting at Thebes, a great battle, we heard, at Chaeronea on the river Haemon. A corps of the Titaneia lost hundreds in Thessaly, between Scotussaea and Cynoscephalai, before making off with half the prime stock of the nation. A brigade under Hippolyta and Skyleia laid waste to the Peloponnese from the Isthmus to Patrae. They captured Nisa intact, with both ports of Nisaea and Cenchreae, as well as Troezen, Sicyon, and Orchomenos, and occupied all of Corinth except its citadel, the Acrocorinth. Amazons are not looters. They care nothing for gold, slaves, or property; the only wealth they prize is horses. They had so many now that no nation of Greece could pasture them. Certainly Attica couldn’t. Selene came back from Thebes with six new animals. Her string was now seventeen. Other warrioresses had even more. These must be rotated to pastures at Marathon and Thria, in cavalcades of thousands, or driven north to the plains of Boeotia in great dust-trailing herds. The Amazons dammed the Ilissus and Cephisus and turned the Eridanos, such drizzle as it produced, into a watering trough. The Haymarket they made a racetrack. They occupied all the outer boroughs now. At night their fires blanketed Market Hill and the Hills of Ares, the Nymphs, the Pnyx, and the Knights. We camped across from them on the hills of the Muses and Ardettos; we still held the Cemetery, East Melite, and the full quarter of Itoneia.

  At this early stage of the siege, the bulk of Athenian companies at arms was still quartered in the town. Horses of the cavalry units were picketed on the slope south of the Museum, others before the Palladium and Ioneum. Astonishingly, the defenders’ morale held high. Now that the women and children of Athens had been gotten safely across to Euboea, the men settled to their duty. A refreshing equality suffused the site, as knights and yeomen found themselves recruited to the same chores: the erection of defense works, the clearing of fields of fire, and the humping of quarry baskets of rock up the Three Hundred Steps of the Acropolis, there to be loaded onto counterweighted booms that the engineers would crane to freight the magazines that fed the citadel’s artillery. The companies labored at this task in two-hour shifts, twice one day, thrice the next. Everyone worked, including the king.

  One such noon, perhaps twenty days after the invasion’s onset, the lady Antiope called me to attend upon her. A page brought the summons, just as I dumped my hundredweight at the summit. “Next time hail me at the bottom!”

  The lad led me to the king’s palace, called the Crooked House for its inclined foundation, on the south pediment of the Rock. One could not wash up. No water for that. At the lady’s door a second page waited with a broom. He beat the chalk off my back and plastered my mane with oil.

  The lady received me in the nursery, which was outdoors, high up, a gallery open on two sides, screened from the sun by that type of marine canopy called a topsider. The day was high summer but the space beneath the fly remained breezy and cool. A vantage gave toward Ardettos and another to the Nine Gates. Painted dolphins disported themselves across two walls; the floor was tile made to look like sand, with sea crocuses and starfish underfoot, the whole ingeniously contrived to create the illusion of treading on ocean floor, safe beneath the waves. It was a babe’s room, and a delightful one.

  The lady was dismissing two knights as I entered. I recognized them as horse couriers, employed by the Council of Lords as well as by the king. “Welcome, my friend of the plains! Come in, Damon. Forgive me for not sharing an hour with you before this time.”

  The lady motioned me toward a child-sized bench. There was no other place to perch, save a rocking horse or a smiling-sun drum. “Don’t be shy,” Antiope teased. “Court ministers have parked on that hobby colt. Besides, we are all shorn of dignity in the play attic of a child.”

  I was struck as ever by the lady’s beauty, and by an aspect I had never seen on her—sorrow. She seemed a figure of poignancy, speaking Greek, with her flesh made over by maternity. She sensed my perception. She asked if I remembered, from her country, the custom of the two cats.

  “D
uring the season of the Gathering, two felines, one black and one white, rule on alternate days. A woman is one person on Ulla’s day and another on Narulla’s.” She smiled. “I have become in your country a different cat.”

  I asked what kind. I meant it lightly; to my surprise, the lady drew up with gravity. “I am no longer who I was, but not yet who I must become.”

  She rose from her bench, gently detaching the babe from her breast. He was a rugged tyke. Did I wish to hold him? I demurred, citing the clumsy paws of bachelorhood.

  “Do you hate me, Damon?” the lady asked of a sudden. “So many do,” she observed, “of your people and my own. Better I were dead, for the woe I have brought to both our nations.”

  Antiope set the infant in the crook of my arm. Below we could hear the couriers’ horses departing. Antiope crossed the toy-littered carpet and stepped out upon the gallery. I followed.

  “Do you count yourself friend to Athens, Damon?”

  She meant Theseus. Most emphatically, I declared.

  “You sailed with him to the Amazon Sea and have taken his part in the seasons since. Do you love him?”

  I stammered something.

  “I do,” she swore. “More than I imagined I could love anything. More than my own people; more than this babe, flesh of my own flesh.”

  She squinted down toward the Half Ring, upon whose ramparts Theseus labored, somewhere, even now.

  “When I departed my country at his side, I judged him a great man. But now that I have come to know him as only a wife and friend may, I realize this estimate was far too slender. Kings before him ruled by might; he governs by restraint. Who has shown such greatness of heart? Theseus dares that which not even the gods have assayed: to elevate the race of humankind. To endow each individual with sovereignty over his own heart and to lift the state as a whole to govern itself. Every hand is against him in this, even his own nature, which loves the wild ways, as you have seen. You do not appreciate what you have here at Athens, Damon. Such a thing has never existed and, once extinguished, may never come again.

  “What is new too is what has been born between this man and this woman, between my husband and me. I know it is right because so many hate it. It is the hope of the world. Yet it must fall, and I must make it fall. Do you understand, my friend?”

  I did not.

  “My people have come for me. I must go to them. Dead or alive, they must possess me.”

  She had crossed back within now, to a chest whose outlines I could just make out in the sudden gloom, and, employing the key she wore on a chain about her neck, opened it. She withdrew her pelekus, the double axe with which she had slain Prince Arsaces in the duel at the Mound City.

  “Only one deed can stop this war: the slaying of Eleuthera. She is the invading army’s heart. Kill her and the host packs up for home.”

  She regarded me. “Yet who is a match for this greatest of warriors? Not Theseus, for all his strength and valor. Eleuthera is too quick for him. She will not let him close with her, nor is he her equal, for all his prowess, in mastery of arms. One-on-one she will beat him. And his pride will make him duel her one-on-one.”

  Antiope had not spoken in my direction throughout. Nor did she now, rather offered this address to herself or some unseen token, myself present as witness alone.

  “Only one champion is a peer for Eleuthera.”

  She meant herself.

  “Yet my husband forbids this. He has exacted this pledge from me, never to offer such action, even if the city fall or he himself be driven down beneath the onslaught of my countrywomen.”

  The Amazon turned at last in my direction.

  “Do you know why I summoned you, Damon?”

  I did not.

  “To kill you.”

  She lifted the pelekus in its sheath of oiled fleece. “You are my size. Your tunic will cloak me. I bind my hair like yours and mask my face within the shadow of your helmet. I walk out the gate and take my place among my people. Nothing less will make them withdraw.”

  She met my eyes.

  “But I cannot do it. This is how weak I have become.”

  She regarded the axe within its sheath. Here was no mean instrument, but a two-hander, stout as a woodsman’s oak feller. I have seen many heft such a weapon. None held it like this Amazon. She turned from it to me.

  “There is one other way this war may end.”

  I waited.

  “If I am dead.”

  I begged her not to speak so.

  “If I am dead, the object of the invasion no longer exists. Yet I must not perish by my own hand, for none would credit this, nor by homicide, which would inflame my people’s wrath the more. Only in one way will my death produce a period to this conflict. I must fall in battle. In battle against my own.”

  With a tug she released the thong which bound the axe’s sheath.

  “My husband has divined this. It is why he has commanded that no man arm me, nor place me at hazard in any way. Do you know why he does this?”

  I did not.

  “To preserve my soul. Which will be lost, he believes, if I raise this arm against those who love me.”

  The lady forced my eyes to meet hers.

  “The hour will come, Damon, when I must break the vow I have made to my beloved and arm to fight against my own. I will call you then. Will you come?”

  The lady read the query which must have shone like flame in my eyes. Why me? Why not any page or squire?

  As gently as a mother tugs the caul from her infant’s curls, so did the Amazon slip the sheath from the double axe. “A warrior of tal Kyrte may be armed only by one who loves her. This is why I summoned Selene before the duel at the Mound City. And why I call you now.”

  At these words my brow flushed.

  “You love the wild ways, Damon, as you love Selene. That love has twinned you with her and me and our lord the king. And with this child.”

  She advanced before me. With a shock I realized I yet held the babe. Before his face the lady now extended the axe, side-on and gleaming like a mirror. The child gurgled in delight; his chubby fist extended. Antiope tugged the blade clear.

  “In the name of that love and of both our peoples, I beseech you, Damon: come when I call. Wrap me, I beg you, in my death armor.”

  Stone steps descended from the palace to the Square of Erechtheus atop the summit, congested now with bivouac tents and outdoor kitchens, facing the precinct of Athena Polias, Protectress of the City. A page was waiting when I came out. He conducted me down the Three Hundred Steps, past the sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos and Persuasion, the goddesses by whose aid our king had united the warring baronies of Attica, and across the sprawl of defense works to where Theseus now labored atop the Enneapylon, reinforcing the breastworks of the Seventh Gate. Gangs in hundreds sweated in the sun; the king labored too. This was how one was granted audience with the lord of Athens. You picked up a stone and toiled at his side.

  Theseus offered only a glance in my direction, but in it I read plain: the couriers had reported my reception by the lady Antiope. “To what did she make appeal, my friend? Love of Athens or of Selene?”

  “Both, my lord.”

  Before I could incriminate myself, the king eased me from the scaffold.

  “I cannot let Antiope arm for battle, Damon. Not only for reasons of her honor, to avert the treason that such an act would constitute in the eyes of her people and of herself and of the world, nor for my own self-interest, the loss of her love, which I could not endure. But for the preservation of the state. And more: of the ideal of self-governance that Athens has come to embody and exemplify.”

  He regarded me, grave as a ghost.

  “I should never have taken Antiope from her people. Some god must have addled my wits. But once taken, she must be defended to the extremity. This is the canon of kings and the ordinance of sovereign states.”

  His look inquired if I understood.

  “If the king cannot defend his house,” he
said, “he cannot defend his kingdom. He fails—and Athens fails with him. Even victorious, the city’s ideal falls. This cannot be permitted! Let me die defending my beloved, let the city herself fall—yet Athens’s ideal lives on. But for me to survive, for the city to endure, losing Antiope? This is the solitary outcome which cannot be countenanced. Do you understand, Damon? May I have your oath, you will not arm her?”

  I pledged. The king set his hand upon my shoulder.

  “You imagined we had entered unknown country, my friend, when we voyaged across the sea to Amazonia. Yet that was nothing beside the frontier I cross each evening with this woman who is my equal. Each dawn new continents are sighted; each night one alights on shores where no man’s sole has trod.”

  He laughed and squinted toward the Hill of Ares, barely a bowshot away, upon which sprawled the central camp of the Amazons. “Have you found Selene yet?”

  Several times, I replied, at Coele and south beyond the Temple of Herse and Pandrosos.

  “My lady summoned you this day,” our king instructed me, “because of your love for Selene. She sees you two as a set to herself and me, like pairs of fire dogs in a hearth.” He clapped my back with a laugh. “Give thanks you have only to duel Selene, my friend. God help you if you must love her.”

  It is a terrible thing to be a king, especially a great one, for one must serve ideals of spirit at the price of lovers of flesh and blood. Who profits from a king’s fidelity save generations a thousand years unborn, and which of his works will they recall at that remove, or care?

  BOOK EIGHT

  SISTERS IN

  ARMS

  24

  AN ARMY

  OF CARPENTERS

  Selene’s testament:

  For another month the Athenians fought us. If their manner of warfare could be called fighting.

  Skyleia broadcast her outrage in night council. “God has birthed these Greeks from his ass! Have they no shame? I have run out of insults, seeking to draw these rodents from their dens. Who has seen this? Not even a rat fights with such want of chivalry!”