Last of the Amazons

by Steven Pressfield

  What mule is more stubborn than the bumpkin? Philippus and I bullied and pleaded, invoked Theseus’ name, not to say every local god and hero we could think of. No use. These garlic-grubbers had set their bowels. They would defend their miserable patches, they and their sons, with stones and meathooks and bare hands.

  We reached my brother’s farm around sunset. The place had been razed to bare stone. The raiders, Copper River Scyths, had scalped two of the hands and chased Elias’ bride into a dry well, raining rock and rubble upon her until they tired of this sport. She was all right, but cut up pretty badly.

  The second dawn we saw Amazons. Not clans of the Lycasteia and Themiscyra we knew, but Chadisia and Titaneia. They swept south, seeking what? the city? the southern passes? Where Philippus and I remained, at Acharnae rallying the crofters, one encountered not Amazons but Scyths. The natives believed now. But a new pigheadedness had taken them. They would not make for the city proper (too newfangled for them) but fell back on the upcountry keeps, the strongholds of the local barons. Countrymen breaking for town now paid hell for their tardiness. On the road the Scyths overran them in mass; cross country they rode them down one by one. The Scyth is an impaler. He spikes skulls and nails hides to trees. Numbers of our own sought to hide in garners or root cellars. This is raw meat to the Scyth. He sights a likely covert and falls upon it with fire. He spits the first bugger he flushes; this one gives up the rest. We saw men scalped and still living, disemboweled and staggering with the spool of their guts in their fists. To prize off a finger ring is not the Scyth’s style. He hews the hand entire and frees the band with his teeth. He will hatchet a head to gain an earring, scattering the pulp to his dogs, or that army of curs, self-recruited, which scavenges the banquet wherever he treks. Nor will you cheat the Scyth by stuffing goodies up your bum. He carves this as a house dame a goose and buries his arm to the elbow. God help those matrons who sought to stash treasure anywhere but in their purse.

  As for me, I had my own problems, namely evacuating my father and his kith. These codgers had dug in, intractable as goats. I had to truss the old man hand and foot, he spewing oaths the while, and pack him in on a two-wheel cart. Next my uncles and their people, who at least acceded to reason, not to say the sight of a troop of Thracian Saii torching their neighbor’s barns. Then my own poor patch. I owned only one item worth an iron spit—a colt named Tanglefoot I had hoped to race. Two sisters of the overhill farm, Gaia and Maia, had been my jockeys. They were twelve, twins, superlative riders. I set Gaia on this horse and her sister on another, ordering the lot to town. But at Holm Oak Hill, so I was apprised later, the lasses’ party drew up across from a cohort of Amazons. Gleaning but one glimpse of these warrioresses (and that at above a quarter mile), the twins fell smitten. At once they forswore allegiance to nation, hearth, and gods, and flew to the foe, who welcomed them, as clearly they had scores and hundreds of others. Nor would these maidens come back.

  To war’s wonted horrors had been added such grotesque inversions. A state of hysteria gripped the populace. The defenders beheld their assailants driven on by lyssa and outere. It was this ecstasy that struck the deepest terror, for it called our own wives and daughters like the horns of the moon. Men’s slumber was riven. Children sensed this upending of order. They wailed nightlong and no remedy could pacify them.

  No one slept the next three days. A man rode to exhaustion, collapsed where he stood, then got up and went at it again. Our troops defending the city could not be called an army. They were militia. Farmers and shopkeepers, grovers and vineyardmen, many armed with only billhooks and mattocks. The knights of the baronies alone could be called warriors. These at least could ride and fight. But the more desperate the peril became, the more pressure each prince felt to defend his own stronghold, city be damned, so that numbers of nobles, even those who called themselves companions to Theseus, balked in the event and could not forsake elders and retainers and ancestral lands. In the end barely fifteen hundred knights rallied behind the city walls.

  Philippus and I linked with these on the third day. Theseus led the troop out. The riders were all good men, stoutly armed and organized into companies. The Amazons toyed with us. I was with a cohort of three score on the plain near Thria when two wings of thirty warrioresses fell upon us. We formed a skirmish line, armed with saber and javelin. The enemy were Titaneia Amazons, holding our corps in such contempt as to send even their novices. They attacked with the bow and the battle-axe. We could not touch them. Three shafts each the foe loosed, the first at range as she approached, the second at the rush, the third point-blank as she ripped past. If one found its mark, the shooter wheeled upon her prey, sinking shaft after shaft, and when he dropped she fell on him with axe and scalping knife.

  In the city men toiled without intermission, throwing up walls and breastworks, packing in rations and materiel. Shore roads teemed with evacuees bound for every cove and strand between Phaleron and Marathon, where husbands packed wives, children, and stock aboard smacks, bumboats, galleys, lighters, barges, any bucket that would float, to be ferried across to Euboea. Night and day the armada shuttled. On the shingle Theseus’ paladins detained those able to fight and confiscated the treasure of all evacuating. Every bauble and trinket must be recruited to the city’s need, to bribe the foe, fortify the ally, buy our way out if we could.

  On the sixth night the citizenry, or what ragged portion remained of it, rallied in the city before the Temple of Hephaestus. A downpour had turned the square to mire. I arrived at the tail of the opening motion. I had never witnessed such a riot.

  The throng called first for Antiope’s surrender. Turn the bitch over to the foe! She was the cause of this calamity! Pack her off and hell take her!

  Theseus confronted the multitude. Antiope was his bride, the mother of his son. If she went, he went.

  Panic now seized the assembly. The people dared not call their king’s bluff; without him they were cooked and they knew it. Their posture reversed, dropping all notice of Antiope, demanding instead an end to democratic assembly and the accession of Theseus to supreme command. With one voice the mob called their king to the post of autokrater, commander without appeal.

  Theseus refused.

  The square seethed like a cauldron. The mob, above six thousand densely packed, no longer conveyed its convictions by speech, but swept in mass from one bank to the other. Men did not vote by show of hands, rather migrated physically from shore to shore within the square, crying their posture. Theseus put this question to the people: Fly or stand? The riot redoubled. Men literally seized one another, citizen seeking to convert citizen by brute fervor. I saw my cousin Xenocles with his claws about the throat of some hapless bugger, who choked back with matching zeal, while two others sought to lift both and bear them bodily across the square to where the adherents of their own position had taken station.

  Three times Theseus set the motion before the people. Three times the mob refused to respond, calling instead for his accession to supreme command. Take over! Tell us what to do!

  The king would not do it.

  He would compel the people to rule themselves.

  Remember at this hour it was by no means certain that the city would be defended. Half the citizenry, even those now within the walls, were loading up to flee. The enemy had not yet sealed Attica. You could still get through. You could still get out.

  Theseus reconvoked the debate: Stand or fly?

  The downpour continued to pelt the square. Men were torn; some who had lost farm and family wished to quit with their lives; others in matching straits burned to fight, believing they had no more to lose. Some who retained lives and property wished not to hazard these by resisting the foe, while more in the same case shouted that to fly was to give up life and property both! Meanwhile numbers, perhaps two fifths of the state, had decamped to their home baronies, the upcountry holds. Two thousand had taken refuge on Mount Hymettos; more camped at Ardettos and Lykabettos, and in strongholds on Parne
s. Others aimed to ferry to Salamis or Troezen, or shoot the isthmus to the Peloponnese. No few hoped to fly to Sicily or Italy, even Libya and North Africa.

  Past midnight couriers came in. The foe had captured the last passes over Parnes and Cithaeron. Eleusis had been taken; the enemy held the Thriasian highway. Further terror was produced by the arrival of a runner from the Isthmus. This too had fallen, eliminating all escape by land.

  The invaders had sealed Attica. Athens was surrounded and cut off. Had Theseus anticipated this? Had he stalled the Assembly till the foe had done his work for him? Many have asked in subsequent season; he has said only, “The people voted aright.”

  Indeed they did, now they had no choice.

  Stay and fight!

  Defend the city!

  But Theseus would not settle for this. He insisted the vote be tallied not by show of hands or acclamation but that the electorate take station bodily on either side of a line, which he scribed himself with the butt of the skeptron into the muck bisecting the square. This was so that all could see who stood where and, more important, that none reverse except in infamy.

  Theseus had the Knights awakened before dawn; the corps marshaled in the Horse Square on the Hill of the Muses. Allies had come in overnight: from Thessaly, Pirithous and Peleus with a hundred cavalry and four hundred pikemen; from Crete, the boy-prince Triptolemus with three hundred famed archers; from Sparta, the spearman Amompharetus with eighty armored infantry. The apparition of these heartened the defenders mightily. Theseus spoke, addressing all:

  “Knights and Companions, you are the champions of the state, the scions of her noblest houses. You she may count upon to do or die. Yet, if I read you right, another question disquiets your hearts.

  “What of our comrades, you wonder, the farmers and craftsmen who constitute our corps? They are not fighters. Many own neither armor nor weapons; the only thing they know of battle is how to run from it. Look in their eyes. They are terrified before this foe and her unprecedented numbers and savagery. Will such troops hold? How shall we command them? Hear, brothers. I will tell you.

  “Men in fear crave order. Give it to them. Tell them where to sleep and where to shit. Make no appeal to lofty ideals of patriotism or self-sacrifice. They are too dread-stricken to hear. Just tell them what to do. Keep it simple. ‘Stand there. Hold this. Do that.’

  “Your job now is to quell your men’s terror. Get proper food into their bellies and proper arms into their fists. Bind your fellows with sweat, for who builds a wall builds valor, and who whets his bronze whets his courage. Let your men grumble; it makes them feel like soldiers. Let them joke, for none can fear and laugh at the same time. Remember that each man’s concern is for his own family now. This is natural; do not seek to quell it. Unity will come. The foe will force it upon us.

  “A word about arrogance and impatience. Some of you fancy yourselves favored. You offer smart remarks of the husbandmen who comprise our army, naming them rubes and yokels. You err, brothers. For they know something you don’t. They know how to endure. Rude, flinty, hard-bitten? These are the qualities Athens needs in this hour, more than heroism, more than brilliance. Therefore, bear your command with humility. Lead, do not condescend. Remember, these are great events and men will rise to them. Treat every man as a soldier. He may surprise you and be one.”

  He indicated Peleus and Pirithous, Triptolemus and Amompharetus. “If you fail of inspiration, brothers, look only to these knights who have with such honor crossed seas and mountains to stand at our shoulders. If they will shed their blood for Athens, how may we, her own sons, offer less than our all?

  “Lastly, my friends, recall that the worst that can come—death and extinction—may not be robbed of honor unless we so consent. God Himself cannot take this from us: to fall with valor, if fall we must.”

  Theseus had barely finished when a cry resounded from the west-facing lines. Men were gesticulating and running. I fell in beside my brother; we mounted the bluff, still chill in shadow, toward the wash of the ascending sun. You know the summit of the Muses’ Hill; the Acropolis mounts at its hip while across the laundry-hung rooftops of the Weavers’ Quarter, sliced through by the Ceramic Way, arises the Hill of Ares, mate to the Acropolis and stark with its bluff side facing.

  Along this crest now horsewomen of the Amazons ascended. A hundred first, in helmets and armor, then another hundred, and another and another. Now with a sound such as no man had ever heard appeared battalions in such numbers as to obliterate the ridgelines from the Ceramicus to the Itonic Gate. A thousand, and a thousand more, and three thousand, and five and seven and ten. These did not charge but walked, absent haste, one hoof set before another, in such myriads as made the stone tremble beneath their tread, and ourselves, observing at range, quake with palsy from sole to crown.

  To the fore advanced the enemy commanders. One saw knights of the Scyths and Issedones; horse cohorts of the Massa Getai and Thyssa Getai; Ceraunians and Cicones and Aorsi; Tower Builders and Black Cloaks; Macrones and Colchians, Maeotians and Taurians and Rhipaean Caucasians; cavalry commanders of the Phrygians, Lykians, and Dardanians; brigadiers of the Chalybes and Mysians and Cappadocians; Gagarians and Thracians of the Strymon and the Chersonese; Saii and Tralliai and Androphagi; black Sinds and blond Alans; nation after nation and, at the center atop the Hill of Ares, the Amazons of Themiscyra and Lycasteia, Chadisia and Titaneia.

  Eleuthera and Hippolyta advanced before the corps; you could see the former’s triple-crested helmet and her elder, bareheaded, with slung pelekus and iron-colored plait. Behind them into view ascended rank upon rank. The rising sun shot flares and diadems off their bronze, burnished to incandescence, so that the front they presented was not one of figures individual or human to whom appeal might be made, but an unholy wall of glare and dazzle, blank and faceless and implacable. The line of the foe extended north across what had been the marketplace and cemetery but was now a martial plain, already called by our men the Amazoneum, out of sight round the shoulder of the Acropolis, and south an equal measure, two deep, three, five, seven, until the defenders stared out, it seemed, not upon lines or ranks but a solid sea.

  Across from this our poor few hills projected like islands awaiting the flood. It was a queer moment. On the one hand, one could not but stand in terror of this colossal show of arms. Who could stand against such a host? Yet at the same time the spectacle was of such brilliant stagecraft and brought off so impeccably that one felt struck with awe and admiration and appreciated it, apart from its malevolent design, just for the showmanship. No trumpet sounded. No Amazon commander bawled attack. The foe did not start or stir, only stood, across from those she held besieged, a tide of bronze and iron before which no bastion, not even the Rock of Athena, could hope to stand.

  23

  STARFISH AND

  SEA HORSES

  No assault came at once against the city. The invaders contented themselves for the moment devastating the countryside. Attica is a big place; even the hordes of Amazons and Scyths must take time to sack it all. From atop the Rock one took in the entertainment. For the first days you could make out individual farms as the invaders razed them or, later, watching the smoke ascend in the distance beyond the hills, speculate upon which estate or vineyard now succumbed to the torch. Soon this sport expired; the landscape receded into murk. It was summer and no wind; a pall of smoke hung from Eleusis to Decelea.

  That quarter of flats and tenements directly beneath the Acropolis was called then as now “the city.” Its citizen population was about ten thousand, crammed into a maze of lanes and alleys clinging to the slopes at the base of the Rock. Beyond this the boroughs fanned out. “The town.” As today, one went “up” to the city and “down” to the town.

  The town was both more populous and more open then. The great houses of the wealthy dominated the hills of the Pnyx, the Nymphs, and the Muses; the wide squares of the Museum, the Palladium, and the hero shrine of the sons of Pandion provided meeting
places for citizens and staging areas for troops; while the three great Ways, the Sacred, the Ceramic, and the Panathenaic, facilitated movement from quarter to quarter. About twenty thousand (fifty thousand including women, children, and slaves) inhabited the town in those days. Beyond, the sprawl of suburbs began, and, past this, the countryside with its farms and estates.

  The city was walled then. The town was not. An ancient fortification of Pelasgian origin, called in our time the Wall of Aegeus, ringed what are now the town wards of Melite and Itoneia, but this bulwark had fallen down in so many places over the centuries and been rebuilt in such slapdash fashion as to be unserviceable, not to say unfindable, along a third of its length. Along the other two thirds, houses and tenements had been built flush abutting, incorporating the wall itself into the dwelling places. Doors and pass-throughs had been cut, even lanes and carriageways. Theseus had sought to rebuild this ancient circuit, even funding the project from his own purse. But who believed there was need for it? The scheme languished, progressing spottily if at all.

  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.