Last of the Amazons

by Steven Pressfield

  There where the road now leads to the Ceramic Gate spread a field of rubble. This was our Athenian camp. A tent hospital occupied the west-facing slope. Before this sprawled staked ditches, hide-and-timber palisades, and the anticavalry trenches called legbreakers. Behind extended the kitchen kennels and a picket line for the horses (twelve) and mules (fifteen), which comprised the totality of Athens’s mounted brigade. A breastwork of stone ran from the Eleusinion, itself rubble, to the facility that had housed the Custodians of the Market. Tent flies and laundry lines bedecked this position; some four thousand manned it, none of whom had bathed other than in their own spit for months. The footbridge of Cranaus was a pile of rocks with boards spiked atop. The springhouse was a hole in the ground. Where the plain abutted Market Hill, more lines of our troops extended.

  The oaths of peace had been ratified the morning before. Still the war was not over. Still all held to arms. Watch discipline was maintained. The company of which Elias and I were a part held the post at the western shoulder of the Hill of Ares, where the Amazon camp had stood. Directly above us was the temple the warrioresses had erected to their progenitor, the god of battles, roofless as all their cathedrals. Our troops had preserved it intact, fearing heaven’s wrath.

  On the next hill west extended the lines to which the Amazons had withdrawn.

  The hour approached evening. I was dead asleep, anticipating my watch, which was to commence at sunset.

  Someone shook me awake. Such was the state of anxiety within which all dwelt at that time that I sprang to my feet in alarm, groping for spear and shield. No one else moved. I drew up. Every face had turned west toward the enemy camps.

  The Amazons were pulling out.

  Along the length of our lines, two miles from end to end, every jack of Athens rose and stood in silence.

  The Amazons passed out on horseback in column of twos. The Corps of Mounted Archers comprised the center, with their male auxiliaries, the kabar, on foot at either flank. The day was dry and dusty; the parched plain gave up clouds beneath the horses’ tread. The descending sun struck these, rendering the column in profile, silhouetted against the sky.

  Warrioresses and novices advanced by nation, Themiscyra first, then the Lycasteia, Chadisia, and Titaneia. Those of us who knew them, which by this point meant the defending force entire, could reckon each by the standards they bore and the way they sat their ponies. The column ascended into view on the east-facing collar of the Hill of the Pnyx, tracked across this, then down the saddle at the border stone of Melite, from which it mounted to and traversed the Hill of the Nymphs. The corps skirted Market Hill, inclining east to the Ceramic Road, by which it continued north in the direction of Acharnae. Into view ascended a seemingly endless procession of horses and warrioresses. These bore their totems at battle height, eagle and bear, lion and wolf, aurochs and griffin and ibex. Each rider advanced in armor, burnished to a mirror’s sheen, with her helmet likewise dazzling, bow and quiver at her knees and her axe in its sheath between her shoulders. I have never witnessed a spectacle of such splendor or such despair.

  Down our lines someone loosed a cheer. The men picked it up. Three great hurrahs arose in honor of the column.

  A hymn commenced, from our countrymen manning the ramparts beneath the Rock. I turned to Elias. The anthem swelled. “Fall of the Titans,” the same we had heard the Amazons themselves encant upon the pursuit to the Tanais.

  Now the hour of their passing

  Younger wait to take their place

  Even they weep, who have them vanquished,

  Never more to see their face

  All evening the column remained in view. Elias and I took horses and followed along the Acharnae Road. At Holm Oak Hill we drew up. Flanking the march, remnants could be seen of other wild tribes, males, razing what little remained intact after their months of depredation. The Amazons with great solemnity passed on, leaving the province unmolested, until at last they vanished over the Leuconoe grade.

  All that remained visible, from where Elias and I reined, was the churned impress of the column’s track in the clay. Upon this now descended shore birds in their multitudes, seeking the grubs and beetles harrowed up by the horses’ tread. In moments, it seemed, these had picked the trace clean. Then wheeling in the failing light, they too receded, leaving darkness to close upon the wake of the free women, effacing in its fall the furrow of their passage.

  AUTHOR’S

  NOTES

  ON THE HISTORICAL REALITY

  OF THE AMAZONS

  When we think of ancient Athens, the city we customarily call to mind is that of Plato, Pericles, Socrates; the Classical Athens of the fifth century B.C. Last of the Amazons takes place in a far earlier Athens, eight hundred years earlier, to be exact.

  That Athens might be likened to Chaucerian or Elizabethan London—modest in comparison with the imperial colossus she would become, yet already a burgeoning metropolis stamped with her own uniquely Athenian character. Her king was Theseus, a true historical figure, though his exploits come down to us as lore and legend. Theseus, the poets declare, slew the Minotaur and, later, abducted the Amazon queen Antiope (some call her Hippolyta) from her homeland on the Black Sea and brought her to Athens as his bride.

  The year was 1250 B.C. or thereabout. The Trojan War lay a generation in the future. It was an era when history butted up against mythology, when legends like the Amazons may truly have existed.

  Plutarch says they did. (I’ll pass over other interesting but, to me, less convincing evidence, such as recently unearthed warrior-women’s graves in the Amazon homeland of southern Russia, and the battle murals of the Painted Stoa and the Parthenon metopes.) Plutarch states that an army of Amazons and Scythians attacked Athens during the reign of Theseus. That this force overran the country to such an extent as to make their war camp within the city itself, directly beneath the Acropolis, “is certain,” Plutarch declares, “and may be confirmed by the names that the places thereabout yet retain, and the graves and monuments of those that fell in the battle.”

  Plutarch lived in the first century A.D. If the Athens he knew truly had sites whose names derived from that ancient battle, common sense bids us ask: Did the Athenians simply make up such names, inventing the siege of the Amazons out of whole cloth? Consider the analogy to our own forefathers. Would white Americans have fabricated names like Dakota and Seattle and Massachusetts if Native Americans had never existed?

  Can we take Plutarch’s testimony seriously? If we can’t embrace outright the historical reality of warrior-women, then certainly we can suspend disbelief.

  It may add perspective to recall that scholars of the nineteenth century scoffed at the reality of the Trojan War. Homer’s Iliad was honored only as inspired myth. Then Schliemann excavated Troy and academics ate their words.

  Perhaps in the future a bulldozer gouging a new subway route in Athens will scrape against an undiscovered tomb and into daylight will emerge the bones of Antiope. Perhaps archaeologists, skeptical today of the reality of warrior women, will hold in their hands the war queen’s very weapon, the double axe of Amazonia.

  A NOTE ON SPELLING

  To transliterate or not to transliterate; that is the bane of any writer who tries to transpose into English words and terms that are perfectly happy in ancient Greek.

  My solution is a cockamamie mishmash, part pig-Latin and part porky-Greek.

  I’ve simply selected, on a case-by-case basis, whatever word looks and sounds best to me. Thus the reader will find in a single sentence “Cephisus” (Latinized) and “Eridanos” (Greek); “Lykos” on one page and “Lyceum” on another. Even buildings have not escaped this deranged approach. I like the Latinized look of “Amazoneum,” but also used the Greek “Eleusinion.”

  For such inconsistencies, I beg the reader’s indulgence.

  SPECIAL THANKS

  To my outstanding editors, Shawn Coyne and Bill Thomas (in alphabetical order), not only for shaping and elevating the
material but for championing it in the real world. Few readers (and not too many writers) appreciate, or even know, all the contributions that a great editor makes. Thanks, you guys. Without your friendship and support, I would be floundering and so would this book.

  Huge thanks too to my fellow inkslinger Printer Bowler of Missoula, Montana, for an exceptionally astute unofficial read. It was a pleasure, P.B., to steal your most excellent ideas.

  And again to my comrade in arms, Dr. Hip Kantzios of the University of South Florida, who has been a friend and invaluable mentor since the first hour of my embarkation upon the wine-dark seas of ancient Hellas.

  WARS CHANGE. WARRIORS DON’T.

  STEVEN PRESSFIELD,

  the “master storyteller” (Publishers Weekly) and bestselling author, returns with a stunning, plausible near-future thriller about the rise of a privately financed and global military industrial complex.

  THE PROFESSION • A Thriller • $25.00 (Canada: $28.95) • 978-0-385-52873-3

  “The Profession is chilling because it rhymes just enough with today to make us wonder whether this future will be, or only might be … A ripping read.”

  —NATHANIEL FICK, author of the

  New York Times bestseller One Bullet Way

  “Pressfield dominates the military thriller genre.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  Visit StevenPressfield.com, Facebook.com/StevePressfield, and Twitter.com/SPressfield for book updates and to share your thoughts.

  Available wherever books and eBooks are sold.

  Go to the next page to read an excerpt from

  The Profession

  1

  A BROTHER

  MY MOST ANCIENT MEMORY is of a battlefield. I don’t know where. Asia maybe. North Africa. A plain between the hills and the sea.

  The hour was dusk; the fight, which had gone on all day, was over. I was alive. I was looking for my brother. Already I knew he was dead. If he were among the living, he would have found me. I would not have had to look for him.

  Across the field, which stretched for thousands of yards in every direction, you could see the elevations of ground where clashes had concentrated. Men stood and lay upon these. The dying and the dead sprawled across the lower ground, the depressions and the sunken traces. Carrion birds were coming down with the night—crows and ravens from the hills, gulls from the sea.

  I found my brother’s body, broken beneath the wheels of a battle wagon. Three stone columns stood above it on an eminence—a shrine or gate of some kind. The vehicle’s frame had been hacked through by axes and beaten apart by the blows of clubs; the traces were still on fire. All that remained aboveground of my brother was his left arm and hand, which still clutched the battle-axe by which I recognized him. Two village women approached, seeking plunder. “Touch this man,” I told them, “and I will cut your hearts out.”

  I stripped my cloak and wrapped my brother’s body in it. The dames helped me settle him in the earth. As I scraped black dirt over my brother’s bones, the eldest caught my arm. “Pray first,” she said.

  We did. I stood at the foot of my brother’s open grave. I don’t know what I expected to feel: grief maybe, despair. Instead what ascended from that aperture to hell were such waves of love as I have never known in this life or any other. Do not tell me death is real. It is not. I have sustained my heart for ages with the love my brother passed on to me, dead as he was.

  While I prayed, a commander passed on horseback. “Soldier,” he asked, “whom do you bury?” I told him. He reined in, he and his lieutenants, and bared his head. Who was he? Did I know him? When the last spadeful of earth had been mounded atop my brother’s grave, the general’s eyes met mine. He said nothing, yet I knew he had felt what I had, and it had moved him.

  I am a warrior. What I narrate in these pages is between me and other warriors. I will say things that only they will credit and only they understand.

  A warrior, once he reckons his calling and endures its initiation, seeks three things.

  First, a field of conflict. This sphere must be worthy. It must own honor. It must merit the blood he will donate to it.

  Second, a warrior seeks comrades. Brothers-in-arms, with whom he willingly undergoes the trial of death. Such men he recognizes at once and infallibly, by signs others cannot know.

  Last, a warrior seeks a leader. A leader defines the cause for which the warrior offers sacrifice. Nor is this dumb obedience, as of a beast or a slave, but the knowing heart’s pursuit of vision and significance. The greatest commanders never issue orders. Rather, they compel by their own acts and virtue the emulation of those they command. The great champions throw leadership back on you. They make you answer: Who am I? What do I seek? What is the meaning of my existence in this life?

  I fight for money. Why? Because gold purges vanity and self-importance from the fight. Shall we lay down our lives, you and I, for a flag, a tribe, a notion of the Almighty? I did, once. No more. My gods now are Ares and Eris. Strife. I fight for the fight itself. Pay me. Pay my brother.

  I served once beneath a great commander who asked in council one night, of me and my comrades, if we believed our calling to be a species of penance—a hell or purgatory through which we must pass, again and again, in expurgation of some crime committed eons gone.

  “I do,” he said. He offered us as recompense for this passage “an unmarked grave on a hill with no name, for a cause we cannot understand, in the service of those who hate us.”

  Not one of us hesitated to embrace this.

  BOOK

  ONE

  EUPHRATES

  2

  ESPRESSO STREET

  NINETY MILES SOUTH OF Nazirabad, we sight a convoy of six vehicles speeding west and flying the black-and-yellow death’s-head pennant of CounterArmor. The date is 15 August 2032. In that country, when you run into other Americans, you don’t ask who they’re working for, where they’re from, or what they’re up to. You help them.

  We brake beside the CounterArmor vehicles in the lee of a thirty-foot sand berm. The team is pipeline security Their chief is a black dude, about forty, with a Chicago accent. “The whole goddam city’s gone over!”

  “Over to who?” I ask. A gale is shrieking, the last shreds of a sandstorm that has knocked out satellite and VHF comms for the past two and a half hours.

  “Whoever the hell wants it!”

  The CounterArmor commander’s vehicle is a desert-tan Chevy Simoom with a reinforced-steel X-frame and a .50-caliber mounted topside. My own team is six men in three vehicles—two Lada Neva up-armors and one RT-7, an Iraq-era 7-ton truck configured for air defense. The outfit is part of Force Insertion, the largest private military force in the world and the one to whom all of western Iran has been contracted. I’m in command of the group, which is a standard MRT, Mobile Response Team. The overall contract is with ExxonMobil and BP.

  The CounterArmor trucks are fleeing west for the Iraq border. The Turks have invaded, the chief is telling us. Or maybe it’s the Russians. Tactical nukes have been used, near Qom and Kashan in the No-Go Zone; or maybe that’s false too. “Get in behind us,” he shouts. “We’re gonna need every gun we can get.”

  I tell him our team has orders to enter the city. Five American engineers, civilian contractors, are trapped there, along with the TCN—Third Country Nationals—security detail assigned to protect them. Our instructions are to get them out, along with a technical brief they have prepared for the commanding general’s eyes only.

  “You can’t go back there,” the chief says.

  “Watch us.”

  Nazirabad is a Shiite city of about three hundred thousand. They’re all Shiite cities in Iran. You can tell a Shiite city by the billboards and the vehicles, which are plastered with pix of their saints, Ali and Hussein. A Shiite truck or bus is festooned with religious amulets and geegaws. Reflectorized pinwheels dangle from the rearview and outboard mirrors; framed portraits adorn the dash; every square inch is crazy quilted with t
alismans and mandalas, good luck charms and magic gimcracks.

  Anyway, that’s what we’re seeing now—forty minutes after leaving the CounterArmor convoy—as Iranian civilian cars, trucks, and buses flood past on the highway, fleeing. Comms are still out, whether from the nukes, the storm, or man-made jamtech, we can’t tell. Our orders are to rescue the engineers. Beyond that, we know nothing. We don’t know what we’re riding into or what our chances are of getting out. This is the bitch of modern warfare. Every technological breakthrough spawns its dedicated countermeasure, with each generation getting cheaper and more accessible. X knocks out Y; before you know it, you’re back to deadfalls and punji stakes.

  So we’re relieved, forty miles south of the city, when two Little Bird choppers—the kind used by the Legion, one of Force Insertion’s subcontractors—show up topside and communicate to us by line-of-sight that other friendlies are up ahead. Twenty minutes later we pick up radio traffic from Legion vehicles heading our way and, half an hour after that, two black bulletproofs—GMC Kodiaks with cork tires and gun-slit windows—roll up and brake, coated with gray dust. An operator springs down, wearing a tuxedo jacket and white linen shirt over cargo pants and boots. We can see, in the distance, the three-level overpass south of the city. The merc comes up, grinning in his black tie. My #2, Chutes Savarese, hails him.

  “Where’s the party?”

  “We brought it, babies.”

  The merc introduces himself as Chris Candelaria and shakes my hand and the others’. His ring says SEAL Team Six. He wears another that I don’t see, under the Nomex glove on his left hand: the Wharton School. The team he’s leading is from DSF, Dienstleister Schwarze Flagge, the crack German-South African outfit that evolved in the twenties out of the Zimbabwean Selous Scouts. He just got out of Isfahan five hours ago, he says. Dried blood paints both his hands and arms; the shoulder of his jacket has been charred through; he’s got a dust-caked battle dressing on his neck, above an ear whose bottom third is scorched black and slathered with green combat antiseptic. But he’s grinning. Like me, he wears a beard. His hair is long and falls in a cascade of black ringlets.