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

by Steven Pressfield

  She did not emerge from the gate first, but two Athenian companies, that of Menestheus and Stichios Ox, preceded her. My place was in the former. The foe greeted us with jeers and catcalls but made no move to attack. Then Antiope spurred forth. She did not charge at the gallop, as I have seen carved in reliefs and painted on the bowls of kraters and the walls of hero shrines. She came out at a walk. Nor did she proclaim her identity, citing descent and lineage, as one of her stature had every right; rather, held silent, neither elevating an arm to signal combat’s onset nor hoisting the boar’s-tooth plate that sheathed her eyes to confirm for all who she was.

  Behind her the ranks of Athenians decanted from the gate like winter honey from a jar, sluggishly and tardily. They were terrified. The first line set its backs to the remains of the wall, compelling each succeeding rank to take station before it—the inversion of good order and the very opposite of what their officers had commanded. Still, as each rank accreted, the front advanced. Antiope advanced before it. Clearly no few of the foe took her for a goddess, with such splendor did her armor gleam and by such brilliance did her aspect exceed the common measure of humanity. The hour was still early, the west-facing slope deep in shadow, so that the Amazon, seen from the besiegers’ lines, advanced from gloom into flares of blinding dazzle.

  Out came Athens’s champions, Lykos and Peteos, Bias and Telephos, Tereus, Eugenides, Phaeax, Pylades and Demophoon, the heroes Pirithous (on a splint of iron) with Peleus of Thessaly, Cretan Triptolemus and the Spartan Amompharetus. Last, Theseus.

  All yielded place to Antiope. Nor did she acknowledge their existence but, as the paragon in a tiara, shone forth foremost and apart. She elevated the plate of her helmet, revealing her face. Cries rang across all the field.

  There is a phenomenon which occurs sometimes among massed armies and even flocks of sheep or birds. Movement at one extremity is communicated, precipitating movement at the other. Fear is the engine. Impelled by dread, a man seeks to withdraw from prominence, to add one pace to the distance between himself and those who seek his slaughter. He backs half a step into the throng, onto the mate at his rear. This fellow, driven by his own fear, yields as well and presses in turn upon the man at his back.

  Fear is contagious. Motion multiplies. One man can break an army and one step precipitate a rout.

  This is what happened to the foe now. As his upslope ranks stuttered rearward before the apparition of Antiope, the mass compacted upon the ranks beneath on the incline, and so did their fear. The savage, recall, holds his own gods in awe, but even more the gods of his enemies. Looking on peerless Antiope, he perceived an immortal. Who else could she be but a goddess, or a champion with a goddess unseen at her shoulder?

  The mass began edging back, gathering moment as a tide in its swing, so that even those at the rear who maintained courage were powerless to stand against their fellows of the fore, but gave way as their comrades retreated upon them.

  Antiope advanced.

  The mob backed before her.

  Another step. Another. Now Antiope elevated her right hand and with a tug seated the armor of her faceplate before her eyes. In the same motion she reached behind her shoulder to draw from its sheath the pelekus axe. A cry burst from the companies of Athens. Their ranks swelled forward. The foe’s bellied back. . . .

  Which champion fell first before Antiope’s onslaught? Many cite Harpalus, prince of the Rhipaean Caucasus, whom men called the Bear for the pelt of his chest and whose father, Typhaeus, claimed descent from the North Wind. Harpalus burst at the gallop from the host of the foe, seeking the glory of being first to engage the peerless Amazon. The prince plunged from his horse’s back, impaled on Antiope’s javelin, which she did not deign even to cast but thrust as a lance, catching Harpalus below the right nipple and driving through the thoracic spine. He crashed to the dust, spitting out his hero’s blood.

  Next to stand before Antiope’s rush was Amorges, lord of all Caria south of the Maeander, who faced her on foot, so brazen was his conceit, seconded by his cousin Arimapachus, prince of Mysian Mariandyne. Their weapons were the whip and the noose, with which they were accustomed to taking down the wild bulls of their country and by which they meant to unhorse the Amazon and dispatch her afoot. Amorges, she shot through the eye slit of his helmet. The shaft penetrated with such force (so the prince’s retainers reported later when they came to dress the corpse) as to pierce the skull clean, front to back, and burst forth through the helmet’s bronze two hand’s-breadths at the rear. Amorges fell as a wall does, and his armor clashed as it toppled. His cousin Arimapachus had snared Sneak Biscuits’ neck with the noose and sought now to upend him; Antiope wheeled with such speed as to tangle the prince in his own snare. She jerked him off his feet and dragged him to death across the stone.

  The poets tell how Antiope slew next the twins Agenor and Geryontes, princes of the Lykians, who pastured their herds from the Simois to the Scamander. Both stood six feet and fought with the boar-hunter’s pike, which they wielded, so men said, with the ease of a fowler his gutting knife. They faced her at the footbridge where the hero shrine of Pandion stands. The first, Agenor, she cut down with the slung axe, the ironhead entering his belly at the navel, tearing through both cuirass and war belt to uncinch the sack of his guts. He bowled rearward, still alive and howling in rage as Antiope vaulted to the earth and, wrenching her pelekus from his belly, wielded it to take his head. In an instant she had remounted and spurred to the gallop. The second brother, Geryontes, thrust with his pike as Antiope wheeled to flank him, striking Sneak Biscuits in the hindquarters and tearing off a piece of flesh the size of a cutlet. The horse wheeled in fury and stove the foe’s brains with his hooves.

  Next to fall before Antiope’s rush was Maimon, son of Saduces of the Trallian Thracians, a youth yet beardless but whose pleas to accompany the expedition had softened his father’s heart. Now evil requited the prince’s concession to sentiment: his child beaten down beneath the Amazon’s axe. She sent to the house of the dead Elpenor and Gigantes, lords of Colchis, and, when they rushed upon her, Ixys, prince of the Macrones, and Otos, war chief of the Copper River Scyths. About her had now rallied four Athenian companies, half a thousand men, led by Stichios Ox and the hero Pirithous, fighting upon one splinted leg, with Telephos of Marathon and Phaeax of Eleusis.

  I witnessed only the commencement of this, brothers, for at the instant the first champion, Harpalus, impaled himself upon Antiope’s lance, all hell broke loose across the field. Harpalus’ fall signaled battle’s onset. With a cry the formations swelled and surged and crashed together. My company was swept south toward the Hill of the Muses. Antiope drove hers north, beneath Ares’ Hill and into the flat of the marketplace. Here the foe were Scythians, Thracians, and Caucasians. No Amazons. Was this deliberate on Antiope’s part? Perhaps she hoped to break her people’s will without actually engaging their champions.

  Where I had been driven to, in the companies commanded by Menestheus and Peteos, the Tower, our lines engaged Amazons of the Themiscyra, Lycasteia, and Titaneia. The enemy were mounted; we were on foot. I could see Eleuthera at the far left, where Lykos’ platoons dueled her, and the other great champions, Hippolyta and Skyleia, Stratonike and Alcippe and Glauke Grey Eyes. Did they too seek to evade Antiope? Perhaps they hoped, as she, for some resolution short of face-to-face. Yet who could hide from her? For such were the cries of jubilation resounding at each blow Antiope struck and each champion she took down, and such the echo upon the compact and enclosed field (for end to end the widest reach was under a thousand yards), that every warrior on every quarter could tell her triumphs.

  Antiope was winning. Across two hills we could hear the exultations of Athenians pressing forward and the dirges of Scythians and Caucasians giving back.

  All who have dueled in massed combat know how swiftly sound communicates across the field. Groans of overthrow and shouts of acclaim the infantryman interprets untutored and obeys as the wolfpack the howls of its
leader. The great tidal surges of battalions may be accounted not by orders of their captains (for who can hear even his own name above the din of battle?) but by this measure alone. Our companies yielded Muses’ Hill to Eleuthera; there was nothing there anyway. In fever we flooded toward Ares’ Hill and the marketplace. Antiope! Victory! We smelled it like wolves and stampeded, baying as we ran.

  A boulevard yawed open before us. We were fighting below Market Hill now. The foe were male tribesmen. It seemed the clash had gone on all day, yet the hour was still early morning. At the southern entrance of the market stands a colony of cists and crypts. Here my company, Menestheus’, with two of Peteos’, locked up with a huddle of Taurian and Rhipaean clansmen. The enemy had learned enough of phalanx fighting to know he must seize turf and hold it; this he did now, with a bitter and brutal stubbornness. His rampart was a line of chamber tombs; our rushes could not dislodge him. The site spawned its own species of horror as antagonists overturned the capstones of the crypts and both fired from behind them and used them to shield themselves from each other’s missiles. As the pitch of the clash intensified, Athenians and tribesmen took cover within the sepulchres themselves, soles treading upon the baskets containing the bones of the dead while they themselves dueled and perished. The fighting was not house to house but crypt to crypt.

  In the midst of this I fell wounded. A lintel stone collapsed on me, shattering the trestle of my right foot. I pitched in agony so acute it took me blind. A mate whose name I never learned hauled me to the lee of a tomb, binding my hoof with the jerkin torn from his own back. He had been hit too, shot through the calf with a Scythian ironhead. “Do you hear, brother?” he cried, calling my attention to shouts proclaiming another conquest by Antiope. “Passa plemmyris peritrepetai,” my savior cited the proverb: “Every tide turns.” He propped me against a boneyard berm and gimped back to the fray.

  How long I remained in that posture I cannot say. I saw Selene pass afoot, fighting as an infantrywoman. I blacked out and came to; I thought two soldiers appeared; they seemed to bear me higher up the hill. Someone got wine in me. Lucidity returned.

  Now for the first time I saw Antiope. She had reined on the rubble field north of the Cemetery, on that slope where in peacetime the day laborers assemble, seeking work. Prince Saduces, lord of Trallian Thrace, had been searching the field for her, raging to avenge the slaughter of his son. Now he had found her. I saw Selene again, with her novice Stuff. They dashed afoot among Saduces’ cohorts, joining the phalanx, which lapped the prince right and left. Directly across massed the lines of Athenians, within which Antiope now wheeled, horseback, to embrace the challenge of the lord of Thrace.

  The prince went for Antiope head-on, wielding the two-handed Edonian mace. He meant to decapitate her as the horses passed but at the last moment either lost his nerve or thought he saw a better shot. Instead of bashing with the club, he slung it, sidearm, so that its mace end, which must have weighed twenty pounds, hurtled toward Antiope on the horizontal axis. The great spike would have hewn her in two or taken her horse’s head entire had its warhead struck the mark. But Antiope gauged the cudgel’s rotation, spurring enough that the killing end pinwheeled past, the shaft only striking her hip. Even so the impact bowled her from her seat. She spilled, weaponless save the axe on her back and the shortsword at her waist. About her collected half a hundred Athenian infantry, the companies that had fought in her train. These scattered like quail as Saduces wheeled his steed, brawny as a draft horse, and, retrieving his mace at full stride, galloped upon the downed Antiope. She met him on foot, slipping his right-handed rush at the last instant, to plunge her blade left-handed into his horse’s breast as it passed. So deep did the weapon seat, the burial crews reported later when they purged the field, that shaft and grip were swallowed whole within the animal’s flesh and had to be groped for by hand only to be found, let alone drawn forth. The beast tumbled, pitching Saduces. Antiope hacked his head off with her axe.

  I could see her as she remounted, several Athenian infantrymen having caught her horse and hauled him back. Her helmet was gone; her hair, gore- and dust-mantled, spread wide in a tangle, wild as a Gorgon’s. Both arms shone scarlet to the shoulder. Even her lips ran blood. Her teeth were black with it.

  The host of Thracians broke before her. Athenian infantry ravened upon them. Such a shout arose from the field, resounding between the Rock and the Hill of Ares, as to render all interpretation moot. It was the cry of men at the brink of victory.

  Now the day hung in the balance.

  Now the champions of Amazonia must reply.

  Glauke Grey Eyes materialized first, out of the smoke at the shoulder of the fountain house behind the Eleusinion. She was just below me, so that I could see her seat the horseback javelin within the catch of the sleeve extender and call upon the gods to witness her hour of glory. The quarter she had entered from put her behind Antiope, who, pressing forward amid the din of the foot troops, stood unaware of her rival’s presence. Grey Eyes could have closed with Antiope and slain her in a hundred ways. Yet she reined in midrush, impelled by honor, and called again, until she saw her countrywoman heed and wheel.

  Both Amazons launched at the gallop, but Antiope had the advantage coming from uphill. The flung lances, half again as long as a normal javelin, looked like laundry poles as they crossed in midflight, while each rival, fixing her concentration upon the missile hurtling toward her, heeled her mount to elude its rush. A shaft slung uphill will sometimes “sail,” getting too much air under it. Further, the wind had got up, as it will often at that hour. Both mischances combined to deflect Grey Eyes’ lance. Antiope slipped its descent, warhead and shaft passing over her shoulder as she pressed her breast to Sneak Biscuits’ back. The lance drove on into the stump of a fig tree, splintering as its iron core burst through the foreshaft.

  Antiope’s javelin, slung downhill and protected from deflection by the shoulder of the slope, plunged from its apogee as its hurler had intended, so that shaft, warhead, and core fused, it seemed, into one balanced entity. It struck Grey Eyes’ horse in the meat of the neck, passing through and entering the warrioress midway between navel and pubic bone. The lance drove Grey Eyes through with such force that its warhead shot forth and seated for a second time into her mount, knitting horse and rider. The knight’s arms dropped; reins spilled; the weight of her helmet bore her head and neck rearward, lolling grotesquely, as only the dead do. Rider and horse crashed, shearing the shaft that united them as they fell; blood blew from Grey Eyes’ helmet as her skull struck the stone.

  Alcippe challenged next. Antiope unhorsed her with a blow of her shield and killed her with a javelin snatched from Alcippe’s own fist and plunged two-handed into her breast. Bremusa fell then, shot on the run, and, after her, Clonie and Lysippe beneath the pelekus axe. Exigency would seem to dictate that a band of champions rally and take Antiope on in a pack. But the code of the plains forbade this. Each warrior must advance alone, sustained by her own valiant heart, to duel her sister woman-to-woman.

  Stratonike succeeded in wounding Antiope, a bowshot slung as the antagonists passed which pierced shield, breastplate, and corselet and would have driven through to the vital parts had its warhead connected on the horizontal axis, as the Amazons always shoot at close quarters. Yet somehow the bolt struck on the vertical and hung up between the second and third ribs. The impact nearly bowled Antiope from her horse just the same. She cartwheeled over the hindquarters, spilling to the right side, so that her feet hit the dirt at gallop-speed while she clung with one fist to the mane (the other yet clutching bow and shafts). What man, Heracles included, could absorb such a blow and still haul his weight onto his horse’s back? Yet Antiope did it, one-handed, and made it look like nothing. She could not jerk the warhead from her side, so deeply had it embedded, and so broke the shaft off where it stuck, and kept coming. A cry burst from Stratonike to witness this double prodigy, as she read the hopelessness of her cause.

  The riva
ls wheeled and rushed again. This was on the flat, in the saddle between Nymphs’ and Ares’ Hills, where all houses had been demolished save the wreck of the saddler Euphorion’s shop, whose partial walls, waist-high, still stood. The pair hurtled toward this obstacle from opposing quarters, each seeking to use its obstruction to confound the other. Here Stratonike seemed to outplay her rival, abating her rush enough that Antiope must hurdle the first wall while she, Stratonike, still raced on the flat. Their bolts passed in midair, Antiope’s overshooting, Stratonike’s striking home. The shaft pierced the shield a second time but failed to find the flesh. Now Stratonike hit the wall. Clearance was not high and the horse was fresh. A hundred times of a hundred, mount and rider would have vaulted it with ease. Yet, inexplicably, both forehooves struck. The steed still landed in balance and, had the ground been clear, would have recovered footing even at speed. Yet chance or fate set his landing against the half-demolished second wall, the partition between the saddler’s workshop and his family’s quarters. The mount spilled, pitching Stratonike. She crashed helmet-first. Her neck snapped and her limbs splayed, unstrung.

  What was the number and sequence of those Antiope slew next? Thistle and Xanthe Blonde may be named with certainty, with Electra and Dioxippe, Paraleia and Antibrote. As the champion took each on, she seemed to court her own extinction with enlarging extravagance, so reckless were the tactics she assayed and so ambitious the shots and blows she aimed, not to mention the wounds she received with each clash and the mounting exhaustion to which even the greatest hero must eventually succumb. Clearly Antiope sought to produce the spectacle of her own death, to break tal Kyrte’s heart and vitiate the nation of the will to endure. Yet the very recklessness of her attacks worked to preserve her. The other champions overextended, reckoning that only their most singular strike would stand. Their throws miscarried, while Antiope’s found the mark again and again. It seemed she would put the army to rout single-handed.