Last of the Amazons

by Steven Pressfield

  As a vessel which overflows, I could not contain my joy, but felt as though all I had ever hoped and dreamed had at one stroke leapt to fruition. I burned to make for the Athenian camp to display my prizes before Damon and to claim his love.

  But as I withdrew following the Hymn for the Fallen, a girl intercepted me, named Teardrop, who was cousin to Antiope and novice of her third trikona. In distress the lass imparted this message: I was to come away to Antiope at once, apart on the steppe, informing no one. Further, I was to bring a number of my horses, whom Antiope specified by name. I groaned at this, such is the heartlessness of youth. For I well understood that Antiope’s star had fallen; I feared that association with her would work harm to my ambition.

  Reluctantly I rode out to the site. Antiope waited alone beneath the moon, dismounted, apart from her horse Sneak Biscuits. I had never seen her in a posture of such impotence. This horse as a colt had been named Thunderclap and acclaimed superlative of all the northern steppe, but he had been an incorrigible thief and nuisance, so much so that the elders had summoned Antiope for discipline. Defending her colt, she had likened him to a camp goat who loves to haunt the cookfire, compelled by his rascal nature to sneak biscuits. The council rewarded this with laughter and decreed that the horse may stay but must give up his proud name and take this silly one. Silly or not, Sneak Biscuits had proved his mettle on a hundred fields.

  Now he stood apart from his mistress and would not come at her call. Antiope signed me to approach. I trailed the four mounts she had requested. Her horse, she demonstrated, would not hold at the approach of her step. She signed to me to let her try mine, Daybreak, who was also her friend, and the others I had brought, with whom she was acquainted. None would let her on his back uncompelled, nor heed her commands absent application of the quirt.

  Antiope had lost her hippeia, her mastery of horses.

  Loss of hippeia is an omen of surpassing evil. It means heaven has withdrawn its favor, in condemnation of crimes against the people.

  Antiope staggered beneath this. She instructed me to return to camp, to communicate to the corps the indictment Mother Horse had pronounced upon her. May Eleuthera, she said, as senior of her High Trikona, succeed her as war queen.

  Antiope would enter exile this night, she declared, retiring to the mountains to fast and pray.

  Would she return? I asked.

  She made no answer.

  I watched her ride off, compelling Sneak Biscuits by bit and whip. The sight of horse and rider, who had been for as long as I could remember so leagued as to appear a creature of one flesh, now proceeding estranged and disunited sent dread through my heart of evil to come.

  In camp Eleuthera formalized her accession by binding about her the war girdle, which Antiope had given me for her. The Song of the Underworld was offered for Antiope, by which rite the corps absolved itself of culpability, should their deposed queen elect to take her own life.

  To my shame I countered nothing. Not a breath did I offer in Antiope’s defense, but hailed with all her ouster and excommunication. My blood still ran high with my return to Eleuthera’s favor and the anticipation of taking Damon as my lover. I sought him out that night among the Greek camp and showed off my four trophies, pended from my battle staff, expecting him to respond with pleasure and pride. Instead he withdrew, repelled. I was baffled and moved to fury. I insulted him, viciously, then spurred away, hot tears coursing.

  The roundup and drive home began. To my consternation, and to that of many others, Damon’s reaction, or something like it, was repeated across the company of Athenians. They had gone cold and remote, the Greeks, and regarded with aversion those whom days before they had adored. I witnessed one clash between lovers. Glauke Grey Eyes slung an amulet of ivory in the face of her sweetheart. “You used to show a bull’s dick for me, now you’re limp as a stalk. What has become of you? You have put on women’s skirts!”

  I had not reckoned how many of tal Kyrte had taken Greek lovers. Now on the homeward trek these unions came to light, if only by their disintegration. The Athenians had become stricken with that malady all wide-voyaging sailors know: of being too far from home too long. They rued their excesses and yearned for familiar skies. Theseus must embark them soon or they would mutiny.

  As for Antiope, it was as if she had never existed. No one asked after her; no one offered remembered tales. On the move, her station at the fore of the column was taken by Eleuthera. In camp our new commander occupied that promontory which had always been reserved for her predecessor. The revolution had been effected without a ripple. So it seemed on the surface. Underneath, however, the people moved unsettled. The nation was not the same without Antiope. Order was awry; a color had gone from the day.

  Eleuthera as war queen lacked nothing of martial virtue, and Hippolyta as peace commander was more than wise. Nor did either want for political cunning, particularly Eleuthera, who had already dispatched couriers to the nations of the Massa Getai and Thyssa Getai, the Chalybes and the Copper River Scyths, summoning them to council at the Mound City. Eleuthera had schemes for new alliances, a new war to exploit the victory over Borges and the Iron Mountain clans. Yet the pair lacked some element—Eleuthera for all her valor, Hippolyta for all her sagacity—that Antiope alone brought to the people, and without which the nation stood disfigured and diminished.

  Perhaps I alone perceived this. All day trekking home my gaze scoured the mountains, seeking the dust of a lone rider, sign of Antiope returning. Days passed. The train took its time, allowing the herds to graze and regain their strength.

  One other accompanied my watch. This was Theseus. Though he never approached me, I remarked him day after day, scanning the northern slopes. Dawns and sunsets he watched, the hours one sees farthest on the steppe. He would ride apart from the column, often three or four miles, there mounting to the loftiest eminence and remaining till dark or, if morning, till the column began to move. I knew his coming had brought evil to the free people, as Eleuthera repeatedly professed, yet I could not but feel pity for him. He loved Antiope. It was plain as that.

  On the tenth day he let his mount drift in my direction. He had learned our ways by then. He fell in a distance to my flank and indicated by sign that he wished to approach. By sign I acceded. Theseus had learned not to plunge in impatiently, as a Greek will, but to speak of other matters first. Several times he stood on the point of blurting the inquiry which burned like vinegar on his tongue, yet to his credit he contained his impatience.

  “I will take you to her,” I offered.

  That evening when the herd had been settled, I rolled my kit and mounted. I had sent no word to Theseus, nor even glanced in the direction of the Greek camp. Yet as I departed, at a walk, I could hear his horse, whose gait I recognized, move off, parallel to mine and at a seemly remove.

  We rode into the foothills two days. Clearly he burned to interrogate me. Yet again he mastered his tongue. “We seek a col,” I told him on the second noon, meaning a natural bowl in the mountains where prayer would be concentrated by the configuration of the rock. “That is where she will be.”

  It is cold in the mountains at night; I could see he suffered. He must sleep under my cover, I instructed him. It was comical, his abashment. “You have never slept beside a woman?”

  He writhed in his slumber. Twice he called Antiope’s name and once clamped me so tight I had to elbow him, hard, to shake him awake.

  “Antiope believes she has committed some crime against the free people, doesn’t she, Selene?” Then: “Will she take her life?”

  Theseus rose before dawn, fearful for her and anxious to overhaul her. “If I were to offer my own life,” he asked, “would your gods accept that in trade for hers?”

  We found Antiope on the fifth morn, as day broke. She descended across a meadow of white poplar, a thousand feet above us. “Do you mark her?” When I turned to see if he had heard, his eyes worked as though stung by the wind, though the air was so still a feather wou
ld have dropped to earth like a lump of lead.

  I left him then, not staying to salute Antiope. I should have backtracked down the slope, ceding them their privacy, but instead traversed at an angle, mounting even higher. Turning back on a ridge I could see them, woman and man, cross toward one another within the bowl of the meadow.

  The man reined and dismounted. The woman came up to him, still on horseback. The man crossed to her side and, standing beneath her, embraced her about the waist, burying his face in the buckskin legging of her hip. Only after some time did the man release the woman and remount. The two tracked down together.

  This sight cast me into consternation, for I saw, and credited truly for the first time, that Antiope, bulwark of the people, had lost herself. She was like that space which is neither battle nor advance to battle, but that no-man’s-land between. And I the same. For although I knew my duty, which was to gallop to the new commanders and inform them of all I had seen, I could not overrule my passion, which bound me to the same mystery as had bewitched our queen: a man to whom my heart had surrendered.

  How I scourged myself for this! I abhorred my spinelessness and stood upon the point, more than once, of taking my own life. What had become of my warrior’s constancy? Would the gods rob me too of hippeia, exposing the treason of my heart as they had our queen’s?

  Yet the alternative—never again to speak to, or even catch sight of, this youth I loved—was unendurable to me.

  At last at the Mound City I went to Damon by night. Beside the ships, where the Greek camp was made, I called him away and declared the holdings of my heart, weeping at my own deficiency and dreading more than hell his spurning of my affection. We had moved apart to a space adjacent two vessels a-building. The ships stood hull by hull, with a shack of unplaned timber between them to shield the tools from the elements. Into this hideout my lover tugged me and, once within, broke down as I had, reciting his own anguish at his actions at the Parched Hills. Yes, I had scared him, he said, by my lyssa, battle rage, and my countrywomen’s outere, the emotion of women in all-female groups. Yet he had never intended by his retirement to cause me grief. He loved me, he swore, and had from the moment he first saw me. To hear such words, my heart seemed to dissolve as the ice of winter streams when the spring sun brings its warmth. The smell of his skin, the tenderness of his touch … he sought to take my maidenhood there, in that barn, but I would not endure it. I made him ride onto the steppe and there consummate our passion, with none to witness but the sky, who was made by God and is God.

  Never had I experienced such despair as in the aftercourse of that act. For as a part of me idealized this youth as if he were a young god and held, as a jewel in my palm, all that he would grow to and become, yet at the same time another part saw him for what he was, a boy bursting with the sap of youth and on fire for me, perhaps, only as one in the grip of such fever for any who fell within his frame. And I knew, hearing my heart in his arms, that I would desert the free people for him, yes, even work treason against them, if he so commanded.

  I mounted and galloped away. I drove Daybreak till his lather frothed my thighs, fearful at every step that he would revolt from my rule.

  Days passed. Antiope and Theseus did not return. I vowed never to speak to Damon again, or even present myself in his sight. Yet each night my tracks returned to our bower on the steppe. I could bear this loss of self-sovereignty now, I told myself, when its cost to the people was nothing. But what would I do when my beloved’s captain called him and he mounted to his bench aboard the ships? How would I live, never again to hear his voice or feel his touch? Such joys as had sufficed my heart before he came, to ride and to hunt, now had lost all savor. My lover’s farewell would steal the moon from the night. I would give up earth and sky for him; yes, and sun and stars! I declared this to him and he to me. I would sail with him! No, he would stay, make his life here with me!

  One dawn Theseus was at the ships. Antiope was not with him. I rode in to the Mound City. She was there, on the Runway, training alone. Later she took the baths and attended Council. The camp had become a hive which buzzed of nothing but her reappearance.

  The people had turned from Antiope in a way I had never seen. Had she been conquered by simple heat, I believe, tal Kyrte would have exonerated her. To mount a man beneath the sky, this could be indulged or made light of. Even had her passion been spurned and she mooned about, lovestruck, this too could have been acquitted. But what Antiope had surrendered to Theseus was different. What belonged to the people, she had ceded to him. Tal Kyrte hated this, and hated her for it.

  Among the herds of the steppe, mares will form up in phalanx to expel one “struck by God’s axe,” a cripple or misbegotten. So did tal Kyrte now exile her who had been their queen and champion.

  None confronted Antiope directly. No harsh words were offered. Rather each pair and trikona turned apart at her approach. None would give her fire. When she knelt to draw from the stream, those on both sides withdrew. Even the horses shied from her. I too held apart, I am ashamed to confess.

  Antiope bore the people’s ostracism in silence. She did not go near Theseus, nor alter her regimen, but each morning trained on the steppe, alone with Sneak Biscuits and the others of her string, and in the evening made her camp solitary and apart.

  One night within the Hexagon Court she and Eleuthera fell out. This was the first open clash between them. The people attended raptly.

  The Athenians, Eleuthera declared, prepare their ships now for departure. Will you, she demanded of Antiope, sail with them?

  Antiope: If I do, sister, you for one will not stop me.

  Eleuthera: Those are your thighs talking, wench. I smell the mare stink on you, and it makes me sick.

  Antiope: Whence your rage at me, sister? My love for you may never abate, nor is it threatened by what I feel for this man you hate for no reason other than jealousy of him.

  Eleuthera: I reckon the object of your love, sister. It hangs between the legs of this incurser. What is love, I say, but madness? And what its issue but disseverment from one’s wits? You and I have sworn as warriors to remain free at all times, never yielding to fear or anger, which are forms of possession, undoing the valiant heart. Love is the supreme form of possession. I behold its mastery of you, Antiope, and I abominate it.

  Antiope: What is this “freedom’’ you so venerate, Eleuthera? How are we free, you and I and all of tal Kyrte, except to live as exiles from our humanity, freaks of nature as deformed as satyrs and centaurs? God made man and woman as halves of one whole …

  Eleuthera: Yes, halves. You said it.

  Antiope: Will you make me your enemy?

  Eleuthera: Will you betray me?

  The people clamored, hearing this. Not one sided with Antiope, but each sway and cry seconded Eleuthera.

  Eleuthera: This barnyard stud has bewitched you, sister. Wake up! Do you think love animates his purpose? What he wants from you flows between your knees. This he scents as a stallion and counts you another mare within his herd, as Ariadne and Phaedra and scores before and since. You are this season’s filly, Antiope. He loves not you but the possession of you. How I hate his pride! When I see him strut about …

  Antiope: Will you take arms against me, Eleuthera …

  Eleuthera: Will you stand with this foreigner against your people?

  Antiope: … for I count my skill not inferior to your own.

  Eleuthera: Answer! That the nation may know you for what you have become.

  Antiope’s silence spoke for her.

  Eleuthera: Go to him then! But know this, thou whore: from that moment thy sole treads the planks of this villain’s vessel, thou art mine enemy.

  And plying upon her heel, Eleuthera strode from the chamber, never turning to look back.

  19

  ACROSS THE

  FRONTIER OF LOVE

  Was Antiope pregnant then? I do not know.

  Did she herself know? I cannot say. That she gave birth at Athens
well within the year to that boy-child she named Hippolytus, any who can count the months may confirm.

  For my part I recall the days following the clash between Antiope and Eleuthera as a term of unsettlement unlike any tal Kyrte had endured. The tribes’ blood was high. Games and sacrifices proceeded in the wake of the victory at the Tanais. Many trophies had been taken; their influx into the body of the nation acted as an inflammatory. Those who had tasted glory were hot for more, while they who had missed out burned to “paint their blades” in emulation of their scalp-wealthy comrades.

  Theseus and his men were packing up fast, to sail home, or at least get quit of Amazonia before the people’s caprice took it in mind to make prizes of them as well. Already bands of mounted warrioresses had taken to running speed drills along the strand where the Greeks’ ships were beached. They built up bonfires, these hotbloods, amid nightlong chanting and agitation, producing such an incendiary atmosphere that the Greeks must keep arms to hand as they labored, even erecting a palisade, while they redoubled their exertions to make ready for sea.

  My own heart burned with little save fear for my Damon. How soon would this squadron cast off? Theseus might embark on the instant, compelled by some sally of his besiegers. I could not go on living without my love. I would flee at his side, I signed to him across the space between us. He replied that he would stay with me, jump ship to make his life among the free people. At worst we would fly to some far country, there to reconstitute ourselves as something wholly new.