Last of the Amazons

by Steven Pressfield

  Every eye swung toward Athens’s monarch. Theseus offered no response. Eleuthera repeated her challenge and, when again it was refused, wheeled to face the armies of the besiegers, elevating both arms as if to say, I have tried and been repudiated.

  Now ascended the mightiest roar yet. Jeers and insults were flung at the walls from a hundred thousand throats. Before this storm Theseus withdrew, and Antiope trailed after him.

  I watched Eleuthera spur back to resume her station before the corps. Though she made her face a mask, yet in the cast of her jaw one read plainly that she had got the spectacle she wanted. By sign and action she had fueled the fever that would drive the army in assault on the walls and had turned the nation and the alliance, even those who feared and hated her, to her will.

  BOOK NINE

  UNDER SIEGE

  27

  THE TOLL OF VICTORY

  Damon:

  Here was how Eleuthera came against the walls. She picked out weak points, where the thickness of the stone was under ten feet and the slope least severe. Against these she sent her Chalybes and Tower People. The foe advanced behind mobile stockades, foretimbers faced with iron. Fire and stone could do nothing against such dreadnoughts. The sappers worked their way flush to the walls. Here they dug in and commenced their boring.

  The besiegers’ tunnelers were miners of the Copper River and stonecutters from the Rhipaean Caucasus; the defenders were masons from the Ceramicus and quarrymen from Pentelicon. Now the duel began. The foe trucked out stone on his side; we dumped more in from ours. He cored out his burrow; we packed it full again. The enemy dug mines; we undermined his mines. He bored at angles; we drilled at angles to his angles. He attacked our tunnelers with fire; we countered with smoke. He released wasps into our lodes; we loosed rats and snakes into his. Night and day our crews broke up shops and houses inside the city, recruiting the rubble to throw up secondary walls to defend when the primary fell. Between these we erected crosswalls, breaking the space into defensible compartments. We mastered the architecture of trap hatches and ambush ports. But the foe kept coming. And though the Amazon knights would not stoop to such drudgery as mine-boring and wall-building, still they possessed abundant labor from the kabar and the general crowd, not to say the battalions of aspiring pillagers who had flocked in from all Greece. We fell back, street by street; the foe advanced, alley by alley. Under ten acres remained, the strangled perimeter at the base of the Acropolis.

  Reports declared that the enemy had commenced a causeway to Euboea. If this was true, it put our women and children at peril. The foe, scouts claimed, used sleds and teams of oxen to draw great stones to the water’s edge. They floated these offshore on rafts, sinking them to found the track, then packed the voids with rubble and built the road atop. In this task their ironsmiths the Chalybes proved spectacular, so we heard, fabricating fittings to bind the work together. They were a hundred feet out now, with four hundred to go. Could the foe actually complete this labor? If she could, we would have to abandon the Acropolis and fight in the open.

  Behind the walls, the hours had inverted. One fought at night and slept in the day. Knights caught winks beside their horses, infantry alongside their stacked arms. The month was Metageitnion; blistering, suffocating summer. Men hunkered breathless beneath tent flies and sought shade in the mouths of sappers’ mines. My spot was a dandy; a bench beneath a beetle on the west face; it got a breeze after noon. I shared it with my brother and our cousin Xenocles. He was a boxer, hard as horn, and a wit besides. Elias had sought him out for just these qualities, which, under fire, are dearer than ivory.

  I was shaken awake late on the seventy-first day. The Amazons had breached the wall at the Callirhoe Road. They had got horse in, our criers were shouting, and threatened the entire southern face. Artillery atop the Acropolis could not loose barrages for fear of hitting our own men. My brother rallied with the infantry, Xenocles and I with the knights. I had imagined, before the actual experience of it, that defenders under siege would fight only from behind or atop their walls. This was not how it worked in action. Let the foe punch through anywhere and all bets are off. You must go out and meet her. Infantry and cavalry poured from sallyports, taking the enemy from the flanks and rear. Earlier in the siege the foe had suckered us, drawing us out into ambushes. Blood had put us wise. One must not burst forth in undermanned and disorganized gangs, we had learned, but hold until a stout company could be assembled and set in order by officers. Then you can go—and bring every ounce you’ve got. Nor are such stunts derangement only (though no terror exceeds that of a breached wall) but may be sound tactics as well, for the enemy is never so vulnerable as when her forces bunch up, seeking to force a constricted passage, and thus present their unarmored backs and right sides to the defenders’ counterattack.

  This day was no different. As the massed foe—Scyths, Taurians, and Amazons—poured through the wall north of Callirhoe, Athenian cavalry and infantry swarmed out to draw the fight away into the field. The arena was that quarter that had been Itoneia, a charming neighborhood of shops and residences. It was all rubble now. Our cavalry galloping onto the field numbered four hundred, well mounted and fighting with the desperation of survival. The Amazons carved us up. Their captains issued orders not by shouts, unavailing in the din, but by whistles, which they produced without pipe or bone but by passing air sharply over the tongue and teeth. That sound alone could break us in terror, signaling some fresh feint or attack against which our numbers could not stand and our horsemanship not prevail.

  Most fearsome were their individual champions. We had no answer to an Eleuthera or a Skyleia. The enemy’s mounts were stronger, faster, and better trained; their iron weapons beat our bronze to splinters. It is one thing to defame the foe as “fighting on emotion” and another to stand before her lyssa-driven rush. For these Amazons were not madwomen but skilled professional cavalry, who knew how to fuel that war fury when they needed it and throttle it back when respite called. Further, their cohesion was such that no champion rushed unreinforced, but troop succeeded troop as the blows of the sledgehammer drive the woodcutter’s wedge. Before the notorious “crescent charge,” numbers of our outfit bailed off their mounts and fled on foot. Others were shot down or unhorsed or simply pitched to the dirt from exhaustion, terror, or want of horsemanship. In minutes our four hundred had been halved and halved again. For myself, I found the better part of valor to fight dismounted, clinging to my animal’s reins, I confess, partly out of shame, not to crawl home horseless, and partly to have some means of flight when strength and fortitude failed.

  Our company had carved out a sow’s wallow on the slope below the Palladium and had formed into what we imagined was a sturdy front, lambda-shaped, of infantry and dismounted cavalry, two hundred strong, facing west toward the altar of the Hersephoria, or what was left of it after our crews had bashed it apart for artillery stones and the foe had finished the job for fun. Suddenly in the lane appeared Eleuthera. A score of Amazons thundered in on each flank. All bore crescent shields on their left forearms, with a bow, arrow nocked, in the fist, and two more beside, fletched ends up, ready to load and fire. They formed on line. You could see them take the reins between their teeth, freeing both hands for action. Eleuthera whistled. Within moments two more troops emerged, one on the bridge side, the other where the footpath led down to the Ilissus. On our rampart every bowman drew and elevated. The field was dense with dust raised by the stamping hooves of the Amazons’ mounts, eager for action and ours balking in terror. Through the haze I could make out the crest of Glauke Grey Eyes and the shield of Tecmessa Thistle. Each commanded about forty. More barks and chirrups flew from Eleuthera. At once a maiden of Grey Eyes’ troop shot alone from the flank and streaked across our lines, hanging off her horse’s right side so that only her left heel showed, shooting beneath the animal’s neck. Our fire discipline was appalling; above half loosed their bolts. At once Grey Eyes’ troop charged from the left. Thistle’s cut in eche
lon across our front. Their first volley hit as our archers reloaded. Men were falling like wheat. I looked up and there was Eleuthera, breaking our ranks from the left. How could she know our leaders? None wore sign of rank. Yet infallibly her bow cut down Telecles, captain of a hundred, then Memnon and Alpheus, his lieutenants. We were routed now and stampeding in all directions. I did not see her axe slay Demaratos the coppersmith and Eucles, called the Bald, Androtion, who could lift a calf above his head, and Ariston the tutor. The corpses of these we recovered, scalped with her sign; the first two taken down from the front, the last pair in flight.

  Our officerless corps, or that part to which Xenocles and I yet clung, fled farther out onto the field. We were among the foe’s camps now, being shot at by cooks and baggage bearers. Twice I glimpsed Selene. She did not see me. We were hundreds of yards outside the Half Ring. The field had broken down to chaos. You could see units ratholing like we were; that is, staking out an unscathed patch and hunkering there, hoping to escape notice. What unmanned us, beyond the foe’s superiority, was fear of getting cut off outside the walls. So fluid was the battlefield, with Amazon and Scythian horse ranging at will, that the possibility of donating your skull as some savage’s boozing bowl was far too substantial. Men kept turning anxiously toward the southern gates, the Callirhoe and the Melitic, and to the lesser sallyports through which one could wedge if he must, while the “All return” flag flew and we could do nothing about it. We transited the field like sheep in a storm. Coming upon the enemy in a gaggle less numerous than our own, we nerved ourselves to action; the instant she held her ground, we fled. The battle seemed dispersed over miles, no single clash dominating but scores of lesser frays, all within sight of one another. At one point our forty pulled up on the brow of the Muses’ Hill. Between ourselves and the Pnyx could be counted half a dozen melees, hundreds dueling in each, with a score of subordinate scrimmages at intervals lapping the faces.

  Our troop’s end came on the Street of the Cranes. This was an alley only, where the foundations of the houses had been carved into the cliff, as all in that quarter. Every property had been demolished, leaving a warren of open cellars with partition walls between. Two troops of the foe cut us off in this impound, Titaneia Amazons from the fore, Copper River Scyths at the post.

  Here is how superbly disciplined the Amazons are in action. They did not rush on us in mass down the narrow lane, but sent only two, at the gallop, armed with the throwing axe, which they whirled over their heads to sow terror by sound and sight while they loosed that war cry that turns men’s blood to water. Under attack a poorly trained horse in an enclosure will turn, seeking to flee, thus presenting its vulnerable flank to the oncoming foe. This both our leaders now did. You could hear the Amazon axes end-over-ending. Both Athenian mounts bowled like dishes in an earthslide. Two more warrioresses rushed; two more of our horses fell. From the rear the Scyths pounded in behind a cloud of darts. They drove us into the compartments excavated from the hillsides, while enemy infantry, Dardanians and Lykians, swarmed upon us from the slopes above. A hundred of ours were shot down amid the most horrible cries. I bolted with Xenocles and two others up an incline so sheer a man on foot must mount it hand over hand. Yet such was our terror, and that of our horses, that we flew as on wings. My mate had just cleared the crest when a horseback javelin struck him beneath the left nipple. The word “struck” gives nothing of it, for the missile, iron-freighted and as long as a man is tall, hit with such force as to pierce him clean through. He bowled rearward, the great pole transfixing his breast and emerging a full arm’s length out his back. I goggled in horror, experiencing that shame all soldiers know: I should help, I must … but to what end?

  “Don’t let them!” Xenocles cried in mortal travail. Let them what? I heard hooves at my back. Two Amazons thundered up, helmetless and painted, one black and white diagonally across face and breast, the other red from the nostrils down, eyes ringed in white gypsum. The striped one went after me with the axe. I thought: I will die at the hands of painted savages. She was left-handed and attacked underhand in rhythm with her horse, which had been trained to this art, so that the stroke swept at belly height toward me. Simultaneously, the gypsum brave wielded an Athenian cavalry saber; she was right-handed, so that both strokes came at me between the mounts. I dived like a rat beneath the left-hander’s horse. I was aware of my cowardice and cared not a whit. I could see the left-hander’s heels above me; I clutched at one with both fists, seeking to bite the tendon through. Her mount skittered sidewise, leaving me again in the open; she fetched me such a blow with the flat of her axe as nearly severed my spine. I pitched face-first to the stone; both horses’ hooves beat about me. Then came this sight, impossible of conception save within the derangement of war: my cousin Xenocles, shot through with the horseback javelin, had somehow worked to his feet. He rushed upon the left-hander with the lance still impaling him breast to spine. She shivered the shaft with one swipe of her axe and with the next, backhand, sliced through the hero at the neck. His head bowled rearward like a field ball, wide-eyed and gushing marrow at the base, and quashed on the stone with the sound of a dropped melon. I scrambled crabwise in such terror as I had never known, plunging beneath a welter of timbers and demolition scrap. Both Amazons went after me. I was under a stack two or three boards thick; I could feel the grain splintering as the animals reared and plunged. Lefty had gone to the bow now. A gap of two thumbs’-breadths yawned open in my shelter, exposing my face and breast. I snatched a plank into this breach just as the first shaft struck, severing my middle finger. A second ripped through the flesh beneath my arm. Both braves snatched to reload. I seized the interval and, lurching to my feet, began swinging the plank two-handed at my assailants and their horses. The ludicrousness of this spectacle preserved my life. I could see both Amazons grimace beneath their paint, deeming me a duck not worth drowning. They fell back; I wheeled and bolted.

  Down streets gone to rubble I raced on foot. Riderless horses ranged everywhere. Twice I clutched at bridles, only to be driven off by the snap of teeth nearly taking off my hand. At last I came on a Scythian pony trailing a dragline; I caught it and managed to claim a seat. Below where the houses had been excavated, the last of our troop were being butchered like geese.

  I was at the head of a lane. Though the foe had felled every tree of the quarter for fuel and timber, somehow a lone olive had been spared. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I stared, absorbed in wonder. Then from behind its silver bole emerged Selene.

  She held, as in a dream, mounted upon Daybreak. I could see the horse’s breastplate of ox-hide lapped with bronze. Selene wore no helmet. Feathers of eagle and osprey adorned her hair; her face was painted vermilion and black. She came on the run. My bride, I thought. I longed only to fly to her arms. I saw her elevated axe and heard her war cry. The blood drained to my soles.

  I wheeled, flaying my pony such blows of my bare hand, since I had neither whip not quirt, as to start both his blood and my own. I knew the quarter. The notion occurred that I could fox Selene by fleeing down lanes unknown to her. But in my derangement I forgot the blocks had been leveled. Careening into the Street of the Weavers, I glanced over my shoulder; Selene had shot the angle, cutting me off. I nearly unhinged my horse’s jaw, wheeling him into the facing lane. At the corner he lost footing; we slid sideways and crashed into the wall. I could feel my hip and knee give way as the weight of the beast drove them into the face; my head and shoulder whacked with such force that my helmet, cinched with an ox-hide thong thick as two thumbs, snapped clean and went sailing.

  Here came Selene at my heels. I whipped up to the Square of the Return. The temple of Hephaestus had dominated this eminence, but now only its steps remained, fronting a maze of trenches where the treasury had stood. Selene chased me down one side and up the other. At the crown was the threshold stone, double high, where the coffer door had set. My pony hit this at the knees. Mount and rider spilled in a tangle. Selene reined-in above.
I was down, wedged between the pediment and my thrashing, kicking horse, who frantically sought to right himself on the stone. His hock hit me, hurling me into the wall. The animal pounded to his feet; I hung from him by the mane like a climber from a cliff. I could see Selene’s knee drive Daybreak into position to butcher me. Her weapon was not the bipennis, with one blade and counterfacing spike, but the pelekus, the true double axe. A fan of raven feathers pended from its crown; I could see them twist in the sunlight as she elevated the warhead to open me from craw to gut sack. I thought only: Take the blow from the front. Will it strike you strange, brothers? In that instant, awaiting the blow of my lover that would send me to hell, all I cared was not to prove unworthy in her eyes.

  The raven quills stayed. The axe did not fall. “God help me!” I heard Selene bawl. “Help me to strike!”

  Some force stopped her. I did not stay to find out what. I vaulted to my pony’s back, beating so furiously with my heels I could feel his ribs bow.

  How long does a battle last? Who can tell, in the soup of it? I found myself afoot amid a huddle of infantry. Amazon cavalry in hundreds drove us in a rout. We fell back to the Antiochid district, directly beneath the Acropolis. Here stood the mansions of the great families, the court dwellings of Cecrops and Aegeus and Erechtheus and the ancient bastions of Erichthonius and Cranaus and Actaeus, constructed of stones so massive they could not have been set in place by men but only giants. The foe had not been able to wreck these citadels when she leveled the surrounding shanties. As our companies fled into this province, a miraculous revolution took place.

  The stoneworks of the great manors broke up the enemy’s pursuit. Mounds of rubble offered us ammunition. A wall stood under construction bisecting the Hoplites’ Square; our masons had thrown it up before Borges’ Scyths had overrun the quarter. Our corps now poured over this in flight. Inspired by heaven, or only the serendipity of the magazine, men snatched up stones and hurled them in fusillades upon the horsewomen. It worked! If not at first upon the Amazons themselves, who smelled victory and ravened for our blood, then upon their animals, to whom blows about the chest, legs, and head, and especially the barrages of stones beating about their feet, broke their order. The foe’s rush split apart in the face of these broadsides.