Last of the Amazons

by Steven Pressfield

  In the end the cries of the field compelled them. You have all heard the famous exchange. The final dispatch bearer, it is said, galloped up to Eleuthera, reporting Antiope’s most immediate heroics. “Heaven,” the messenger cried, “fights at her side.”

  “Then I will meet her in Hell,” Eleuthera replied.

  She sent for Soup Bones, whom her novices had brought out of the fight to catch his wind, and, arming herself with a brace of three horseback javelins, called upon Ares, Hecate, and the Great Mother to witness the rightness of her cause. “Ye gods, if you possess justice as you do might, then guide my lance!”

  And she spurred round Market Hill, seeking Antiope.

  Where was Theseus at this point? Twenty witnesses render twenty tales. Sense, and facts established in the aftercourse, place him among the infantry holding the saddle between Ares’ Hill and the Acropolis. Did he see Eleuthera, ringed by her Companions, gallop north to seek Antiope? If he didn’t, surely someone reported it to him. He seized this moment to break from the fray and mounted to that knob called the Tailor’s Nose. Here, men said, he made signal to Borges of the Scyths.

  This was an intrigue set in motion days prior by Theseus, namely to buy the clansmen off for gold. Theseus would hand over the treasure of the Acropolis to Borges and the knights of the Iron Mountains, he pledged, if the prince would take this plunder and break off. Borges had assented. Now was the hour. Theseus raised the signal.

  But as often falls out in war, opportunism and the main chance trump all. Borges was winning. Why back off and settle for part of the swag, the Scyth reasoned (for surely Theseus held out the plum portion), when he could carry the day and bag it all?

  A volley of shafts greeted Theseus’ signal. The tribesmen beat forward, bellying the Athenians back.

  Now onto the field beneath Market Hill, where the Temple of the Amazons stands today, emerged Eleuthera, crying Antiope’s name. Neither she nor any of her nation owned an inkling of Theseus’ botched intrigue. Before Eleuthera’s rush (for regiments of the foe came with her) our troops reeled in disorder, surrendering the market and the Cemetery, taken this hour at such appalling cost.

  The state of the field was this. South and east of the Rock, Amazons and Scyths stood triumphant. Between the Hill of Ares and the Acropolis, the Athenians under Theseus were falling back, pressed upon by Hippolyta’s Lycasteia Amazons, augmented by Borges and the Scyths of the Iron Mountains. North, where the Cemetery and marketplace sprawled beneath Market Hill and the Hill of the Nymphs, the Amazons, Thracians, and Caucasians fought the Athenians under Lykos and Menestheus, Pirithous and Stichios Ox.

  Here was where Antiope was.

  To here Eleuthera came.

  The pair squared off on the shoulder of Market Hill. Each jockeyed to get upslope of her rival. Antiope bore a score of wounds, gravest being the ironhead wedged between her ribs; she sought to conceal these incapacities, but the slope betrayed her, compelling her to favor her right side as she rode. Eleuthera, discerning, seized the left of the field so that Antiope, if she cast, must do so across her body. Antiope countered, sheathing her lance and going to the bow. About them on all quarters the fight had broken off, as if heaven itself had commanded. For men are pious in war, and each believed that who won between these champions would seal the fight entire.

  Eleuthera launched at once directly across the slope. She had ceded the uphill to her rival, bolting across the face, and as they passed she rose on Soup Bones’ belly-band to launch the horseback javelin. Antiope shot. Her arrow crossed Eleuthera’s lance in flight, striking the shield of bear-hide, triple-thick and sinew-fused, hard as tortoiseshell, passing through it and the flesh of Eleuthera’s forearm to strike upon the iron plate of her cuirass directly below the heart. Here shaft snapped and warhead checked, shy of the fatal mark. Eleuthera’s cast flew point-blank, yet sailed, caught by a gust.

  The riders came about and rushed again. Eleuthera slung her shield to the dirt. Clearly she had resolved to trade her life for her rival’s. She was uphill. She spurred to the gallop, rising upon her belly-band to launch the second missile, heedless of her own safety. Again Antiope’s shot rang off her iron breastplate. Again Eleuthera’s javelin sailed wide.

  With each miss, such groans issued from Amazons and allies as if they themselves had fallen, while jubilation resounded from the Athenian lines, succeeded by lamentations of their own as Eleuthera again did not fall. The Amazon herself rose, coming about, and lifted her voice to the Almighty.

  “So, Son of Cronos, you have decided to grant victory to Athens and count as nothing all our nation’s valor. Then drive me down foremost to hell, for I will never yield, to them or to you!”

  A third time Eleuthera spurred, and a third time Antiope answered. Many observed from closer than I, among them my brother, who was still fighting in the companies under Menestheus that had routed the Thracians. He swears, as do other witnesses numerous and credible, that at the apex of her terminal rush, Antiope veered deliberately, turning Sneak Biscuits’ neck so as to expose her own. This much is certain of that pass: Antiope bore no weapon. She galloped empty-handed into Eleuthera’s charge.

  This was the lady’s finish. Eleuthera cast from so close that her javelin’s killing point entered Antiope’s breast, it seemed, before its butt end had left the sleeve extender in Eleuthera’s fist. Antiope bowled over Sneak Biscuits’ hindquarters as a doll is swiped from its shelf by a child’s angry hand. You could hear the javelin shaft snap as the lady’s impaled body struck the stone, not on her back but on her face, her trunk in its armor having cartwheeled through a complete revolution in midair. Her helmet hit first and then her legs. The bindings of her breastplate burst; both greaves sprung from her calves. Eleuthera vaulted to the plain. In an instant the warrioress straddled Antiope’s motionless form. The field had gone to stone. Not a sound. Not a cry. So indestructible had Antiope seemed in her hour of glory that not a soul believed she had been brought low. Before all, Eleuthera seemed most acutely stricken. From where I stood, I could see her face clearly. Will you believe me, brothers, when I declare that her eyes pleaded with the lady: Rise!

  “Ai-eee!” Eleuthera howled, a cry not of triumph but of woe. This dirge resounded from the ranks of Athens, amplified by the foe, until both armies, Athenians at the loss of their champion, Amazons at the perversity of fate, wailed in conterminous despair.

  A troop led by Rhodippe and Pantariste swept forward to claim the body of their queen. Two caught the prize by the ankles and made to haul it back to the Amazon lines.

  At this instant Theseus burst from the ranks across the way. When he beheld his bride’s life-fled form being dragged in the dirt, such a bellow erupted from his gorge as may be made by a bull but not by a man. He even looked like a bull, in his great horned helmet, with the bowl of his shield riveted across his shattered arm, while the jets from his nostrils scalded like steam upon the air. Those close enough to see declared that his eyes showed no white but blood-crimson, and compassed grief of an order beyond feral to primordial.

  With a howl Theseus rushed upon the Amazons. They scattered before him. The king did not retrieve Antiope’s corpse himself, leaving this to the Companions, who flooded in his train, but only beat the defenders apart from it, then with a roar advanced and called forth their champion.

  Eleuthera did not so much emerge as materialize, the ranks of her cohort parting to reveal her. Theseus pressed forward into the breach. He summoned Eleuthera not by her name which means freedom but by Molpadia, Death Song, that citation accorded her by the Iron Mountain Scyths, while he charged the witnessing gods to recall the massacres of the Tanais and the Parched Hills.

  One-armed, the king fell upon the Amazon. His first cast took down Soup Bones, piercing the great beast’s heart even as Eleuthera spurred him to the clash. No mortal unaided may rush as Theseus did now. Eleuthera perceived heaven’s intercession; she wheeled on foot and fled.

  The king chased her up the slope of Ares�
� Hill, within the very ranks of the foe, which parted before the pursuit, then back down to where the Aegeid Gate had stood and now was rubble. Twice Eleuthera stood and cast, but the fury of Theseus’ rush had stolen her warlike spirit; her throws spiked short to the dirt.

  At last before the ruins of the Temple of Fear appeared Eleuthera’s sister Skyleia. “Toward what do you flee, sister?” With these words Skyleia checked the champion’s flight and rallied her valor. “Do you seek our mother’s womb, to crawl back into it?”

  And forming shoulder to shoulder, the pair turned to face the lord of Athens.

  Theseus slew Skyleia at one stroke, staving helmet and skull with the club of his mace. Eleuthera, he beat to her knees beneath blows of titanic concussion, breaking first her left hip and leg, then shattering her shoulder. She plunged insensate, shield hammered to pulp. Theseus elevated his club to finish her, and would have, had he not been shot simultaneously through shank and gut. A corps of Amazons swarmed upon him, horseback and afoot. The King’s Companions met these and dragged their champion clear.

  A melee broke out over Eleuthera’s body. At the same time a cry unlike any heard heretofore ascended from the field to the south. This was no shout of war but something other, unprecedented throughout the siege. We did not know it then, those of us on the western quarter, but to the south the foe’s order had broken. The Scyths had defected. They had left the Amazons in the lurch.

  The mad scrum protracted over Eleuthera’s corpse. Toward this epicenter, it seemed, the entire western field had swelled. I had risen, gimping on one leg with my spear as a staff. Mates stampeded past. “On, brother! Claim the body!”

  I sank in exhaustion upon a stone. Possession of Eleuthera’s corpse changed hands four times. From where I was, dust and smoke obscured the scrimmage. Witnesses later reported that, in the terminal tug-of-war, a corps of two dozen Amazons had formed a front before their commander’s corpse and, reinforced by fusillades from their companies massed left, right, and rear, succeeded at last in driving off the Athenians and drawing the body of Eleuthera clear. Preeminent among the warrioresses had been one who had, judging by the blood and dust cloaking her crown to toe, apparently lost her hippeia, her mastery over horses, and fought all day on foot.

  This was Selene.

  BOOK TWELVE

  LAST OF THE

  AMAZONS

  35

  THE HOUSE OF OATHS

  Mother Bones:

  Here, Uncle broke off, overcome by emotion. For long moments he could not continue. The men of the posse averted their gaze, not wishing to enlarge their comrade’s discomposure by their own attendance upon it.

  It had been twenty-two days since Damon and other veterans of the original expedition to Amazonia, including Father, had, honoring Prince Atticus’ petition, initiated their retelling of our city’s history with these warrioresses. The ships of the posse had continued east throughout this interval, entering the Hellespont on the sixteenth day and emerging through the Bosporus into the Amazon Sea by the twenty-first. This night, the twenty-second, the company had beached beneath a promontory called (so local fisher captains told) the Nave of Mercy. It was to this site during their long homeward trek from Athens that a score of Amazons had been driven, separated from the main withdrawing column by that type of blizzard called in these regions “rhipaeans,” which strike without warning at that season. Taking shelter beneath the same lee under which our posse now encamped, the maids were surprised by Taphian pirates, whose keep the site apparently was, and overwhelmed. They had been bound and staked to the earth, throats painted for slaughter, when great peals of thunder broke above. Bolts of the Almighty cleft the cavern. The pirates quailed in terror of Zeus Who Protects the Wayfarer; they cut the women free and released them unharmed.

  “So too shall I recover,” Damon remarked after a few moments. He took wine and, having recomposed himself, picked up his tale where he had left off—with the fall of Eleuthera at Athens, the climax of the battle.

  With dark the fighting had broken off, Uncle recounted. Clashes had protracted all day, succeeding the brawl over Eleuthera’s body, with neither side able to gain possession of the field. The siege had been broken, however. Our countrymen of the mountain forts, reinforced by the Attic barons and the allies of the Twelve States, had swept in from the north and south and east, driving the Amazons from the Hill of Ares and destroying their camp. This availed little, however, Uncle made clear, as the foe simply fell back, west, to the next line of hills, where she set up fresh bivouacs, still outnumbering our forces two to one, even with the defection of her allies.

  Indeed, Damon continued, Borges’ Scyths had pulled out at the worst possible moment for their Amazon cohorts. It had gone like this:

  Theseus, recall, had contrived an intrigue by which he would deliver to Borges the gold of the Acropolis in return for the tribesmen’s defection from the Amazon cause. But the prince of the Scyths had double-crossed him. Finding his troops victorious at that final noon, Borges went all-out after the Rock. Athenian resistance collapsed; clansmen swarmed unchecked up the face. On the summit the sleds and trundles of gold lay plum for the taking, defended by no one but the women, in numbers beneath five hundred, who had been retained by Theseus to toil in the cooking and nursing.

  Now one, Dora, widow of the captain Thootes, who had fallen earlier that morning on Market Hill, rallied her sisters to the hour. Yoking the sleds of gold to their own shoulders (for no mules remained), the women dragged these to the brink. There, with great shouts to attract the attention of the Scyths below, they pitched the stuff over. The trolleys plunged, strewing their golden freight.

  The world knows the free-for-all that succeeded. Nor must we confine credit to our heroine Dora, for all her brilliance, but honor as well the bronzesmith Timotheus of Oa, whose notion it was to cast the gold not into ingots or bars, which could have been commandeered by the princes while they yet maintained the order of their troops, but to strike it into spits and splashes (and to toss in quantities of lead painted to look like gold). These spilled across the Scythian front like candy at a wedding.

  A melee ensued in which no individual of the foe could simply highjack one lump and make his fortune, but each must rake the dirt, seining fistfuls of the elusive pellets, while brawling in his greed not with us, his enemy, but his own fellows. Clansmen stuffed golden berries into skins and quivers, even into their own boots and cheeks, loosing a hullabaloo whose meaning was divined at once by their brothers across the field. These too broke from their order, ravening after the loot.

  Now atop the Rock, the women of Athens set up those signals which their captains, routed below, could not. With shields bossed to a mirror’s sheen they flashed this message to our countrymen in the forts at Hymettos and Lykabettos, to the upcountry barons and the allies of the Twelve States: “Boedromesate! Bring help on the run!” To this day the festival acclaiming this victory is called the Boedromia, and the month of its observation Boedromion.

  Frenzy among the clansmen left the southern quarter of the field open to our allies. Their officers wisely reined their rush, channeling the reinforcements’ exertions to evacuating our women from the summit. Theseus had returned now from the clash west of the Rock, too wounded to fight but not to command. He let the Scyths sack the city. By nightfall, Damon recounted, the foe had picked the Acropolis clean. Men reported Borges pissing in triumph off the pinnacle. Let him, Theseus reckoned. By this despoiling of the citadel, the prince of the Scyths had resuscitated his standing among his kind, and by his defection from the Amazon cause had revenged himself for his brother Arsaces’ death and his own humiliation, which he had bided to this hour to requite.

  In two days the Scyths had packed up and gone. The general crowd lost no time following suit. Tribesmen of all nations decamped as well, fearing for their lands and herds back home. Within days the siege remained to be prosecuted by the Amazons alone.

  The greater part of Attica was still in their hands
. But the fight had gone out of them. They had lost their corps of champions. The marrow of two generations had been decimated. Though in numbers the Amazons still dominated the field, without the Scyths and Thracians their corps could not press this advantage to prevail. Each day our countrymen built back more ramparts; each dawn revealed fresh allies augmenting our fortifications beneath the Rock.

  Stalemate had set in. The invaders had no strength to dislodge the defenders from their new positions nor could the champions of Athens oust the foe from their secondary holds. Both sides were too crippled by losses and too depleted in spirit to initiate further assaults.

  The land itself lay in ruin. Not a tree remained, it seemed, or a house or gate or so much as a stand of brick against which to rig a tent fly. The sanctuaries of the gods themselves had not been spared, but all, down to the wayside shrine of Pity, had been broken apart, stones conscripted for ammunition. Worst of all was the stench. For days corpses turned up beneath mounds of rubble; rescuers toiled across a landscape of devastation and death.

  A perverse malevolence suffused the wrack, Damon reported, by whose mandate, it seemed, no article of site or gear, however humble, might remain unannihilated. So that if you came upon a bench, say, it had been demolished; or a wall, a plate, a child’s doll. Down to single roof tiles, every element fashioned by man had been sundered or riven. If by chance the odd object remained intact, someone came along and smashed it. What the Amazons had not reduced to wreckage, our own countrymen beat down themselves, toward no end but alignment with heaven’s malice and the pitilessness of war. In the end, Damon testified, you could trek from one end of the city to the other and not find a single usable item, other than weapons and fighting kit. The landscape was a wasteland. When the first wives and children were brought back from Euboea, their despair was so great at the ruin of their country that Theseus had to order such repatriation put off, however fervently the men wished their spouses and infants brought home.