Last of the Amazons (23 page)

The bastion our stick attacked was in three linked sectors. The primary was a stockade of oak and ox-hide, at the crown of an eminence, with staked ditches below. Above and left arose a stone salient, which the Athenians called the Nipple, jutting from the slope below the northernmost wing of the Enneapylon, the Nine Gates. Fire from this covered the flank of the outwork. A third position, forward, reinforced this.

Foot troops of the Saii had breasted the trench that defended the Nipple. They had hauled a fire waggon to the lip, a feat of stupefying valor uphill under a barrage of stone and lead. At the brink, however, we learned later, they were foiled in setting it ablaze. Someone had dropped the fire jar. In frustration the troops rammed the truck unfired into the ditch, where it overturned among the stakes. Miraculously: a causeway!

Over this the infantry swarmed. Our stick and others spurred after. On the steppe one fights with speed, slinging fire from behind her horse's bulk while making herself the smallest and fastest-moving target she can. Not here. The Saii were assaulting the Nipple. The oak stockade protected this position; fire poured from it upon our allies. It was our job to take it, and this could only be done, we saw now, by foot assault.

The tower was two stories, hexagonal, with bunkers at three corners. The timbers were uprights. The gaps formed embrasures. Through these the foe fired bronzeheads and thrust outward with the ten-foot spear and the marine pike. Oak will not burn and is too tough to be hacked through. The only way was up and over.

Nimblest of our stick was the maiden Stuff. She taught us a new trick. She drove her mount tight to the stockade, springing from his withers with an axe in each hand; she drove these into the timbers above her head, hauling herself up hand over hand with a swiftness I could not have believed if I hadn't seen it. At the brink she vanished. The next instant a brute of the foe appeared, clutching his guts and pitching face-foremost from the peak. Stuff was in! She hauled up Anthea and my sister, packing fire. I and four others went against the wall on foot.

On the southern wall of the stockade a stick of the Titaneia had got a line down; they were going over on that side. The fort had no portal; the defenders got in and out by ladders. I shouted to Stuff to find one and lob it over. She could not hear. We were at the north wall. Defenders thrust through the embrasures with ten-foot pikes. Rhodippe hacked one to splinters with her axe; I seized the shaft of another with both fists and hauled with all my strength. The spearman inside pulled back. I was stronger; I wrenched it from his grip. Bremusa and Hesione had dismounted too. We beat back the foe's spears with our axes, then pressed against the stockade wall, firing ironheads through the gaps. Such elation cannot be told. We hacked through the ties of the timber and hauled the wall down with our horses. Above us the Saii whooped atop the Nipple.

We were in the city. The breastworks of the Outer Wall, the Lykomid, dropped behind; the towers of the Half Ring loomed above. The place was a neighborhood, a civilian quarter. The foe had been clever; he had walled up lanes and alleys at random, so that attackers could not tell, spurring into one, whether it led onward or into a dead end. Our horse troops fell for this trick more than once, chasing gangs of the foe into bystreets, only to find ourselves penned on three sides, while he, in squads of ambushers, scurried from house interior to house interior, through whose party walls he had punched passageways, emerging to sling darts from alley grates or unleash fusillades of stones from the peaks of rooves.

We galloped onto the Ring Road. The defenders had broken it up with pitfalls, staked ditches, and leg-breakers. The tents and shacks of his camps fouled the track further; I saw Hesione's horse pitch into a trench at a gallop, shattering both forelegs and hurling her rider like a doll.

Breaches had been opened all along the Lykomid Wall, and through these Saii, Trallian Thracians, and Amazons surged. But the defenders, in addition to their other ploys, had erected cross-bulwarks, firewalls, at right angles to the Outer Wall, with secondary walls cutting off the go-round, and to these they now retreated, hurling stones and missiles, so that our companies had to fight from pocket after pocket, each of which was too confined to permit cavalry tactics and each of which ran exposed to artillery from the Half Ring above. The layout was a labyrinth; all that saved us was the muddle of the foe. The Greeks were mazed with terror. The first crosswall we rushed was of wicker filled with stone. Horses and women jammed up prime for slaughter, but when artillery began raining from above, it was the foe who panicked and not us. We swarmed the wicker hand over hand. Stick after stick punched through the seams. Before us the enemy stampeded for the next wall. “No trophies!” I bawled. “Just cut them down!”

At each rupture the foe broke before us. The bow was useless. Over such ground no one can ride hands-free. The axe. We fought with the axe and our horses' hooves, trampling every man we could get under us. The Greeks fought back from trenches and cavities, on their knees, ramming at our mounts' bellies with pike and spear and the sundered stubs of their one-handers. Artillery rained from the Half Ring above. Chunks of limestone the size of field balls burst at our feet; rebounds caromed, wreaking havoc on the horses when they hit and sowing panic when they didn't, from the animals' innate terror of something sharp and fast-moving beneath their vision.

I cannot say how many walls we assaulted. The hive seemed to go on forever. Our climax came at the crown of an incline. The crew our stick dueled was a dozen, their fort a bathhouse, which stood at the crook of a lane, demolished and afire. Three had mounted to the roof; the rest made their stand behind the court wall. A noble olive rose in the center. Chryssa, Anthea, Stuff, and I took our mounts over the partition. Within the cloister the struggle reached its crisis.

The three on the roof hurled bricks and tiles. In the court others stabbed with butt ends of splintered pikes and lances. One with great chin whiskers swung a mace at Daybreak; I drove him under the eave and took half his shoulder with the axe. A runt on the roof made to return the favor. His foot slipped; he slid down the tile, on his back like a child on the ice, to plunge right over me, landing on Daybreak's hindquarters, spilling hard to the stone of the court. Stuff fell on him with a cry; I saw her smash a heel into his temple, then dive on him with the sickle blade the Thracians call a “nut-cutter.” From the wall others of ours, with allies of the Scyths and Lykians, poured bow fire onto the trapped Athenians. The foes' last missiles had been spent. I saw one, their captain, apparently, seize a dry cheese and hurl it in despair at Hesione as she rushed at him on foot. Another Athenian attacked, wielding an oak table. They never had a chance. Our stick sparred with the Scyths over the scalps.

Ten minutes more and the day's fight was over. The foe's artillery, firing from towers atop the Half Ring, protected his companies as they scurried like rats for the safety of the inner gates.

I rallied my stick. I cannot overstate my dread that one or more had been lost or maimed. Here came my sister with Scotia and Euippe. Stuff, she told, had chased off afoot, harrying the foe. I vowed to scourge her when she returned, but in the event forgot and embraced her in tears. I assembled the remainder, with only wounds that would heal, thank God, and sent them to gleaning, meaning to scour the field for reusable shafts and missiles; the balanced lance and unwarped arrow were dearer than gold. For myself, my nerves were wrung to tatters, from fear for those I commanded. Even my horse was more exhausted than the others.

Prisoners of the foe were being rounded up. My stick had washed up among clans of the Iron Mountains. The Scyths went after the enemy wounded like drovers on cattle, noosing the wretches to haul them off to the slavers' block. This was in violation of Eleuthera's and Hippolyta's orders, who had commanded all captives be segregated for interrogation. But since when did a Scyth care a whit for the orders of an Amazon?

Before the lines, our allies massed, wrangling their prizes as if they were steers. We had wrested a few to safety; more now bolted in fright. The Scyths ran them down and hacked off their hands. “Here, now you can have them!” The butchered Athenians bawled in horror; their mates cried for ransom. They had gold, they pledged, in the citadel, and named preposterous sums which their mates would hand over if only their captors would spare them. Gold is honor to the Scyths. Now these went after the captives who had bolted to our lines, demanding them back. Our front dug in. A bloodbath stood imminent, ally against ally.

At this moment Eleuthera thundered onto the site. She took in the fix at a glance and, dismounting, advanced upon the Scyths, striking with her whip. Others of ours followed, likewise plying the lash. The Scyths fell back dumbfounded. Such was the brilliance of Eleuthera's instinct, knowing that these liegemen, accustomed to being treated as vassals themselves, would retire before the presumption of the lash, when they would have repelled in pride an advance at arms.

My stick got away to our horses. In a raid of a hundred on the steppe, perhaps one animal will fall. Here in this war an hour's toll was four of eleven, splendid mounts all, and a fifth, Hesione's Anare, “Keen,” legs broken in agony. Hesione ended his misery, strangling him with her riding wale while her eyes held his in death. Fallen mounts we dragged from the field by teams, not across the stone, which would have constituted desecration, but lashed aboard litters of hide and wicker. Heartbroken, our stick fell back to the stockade below the Nipple. A cloudburst had broken; rivers sluiced down the slope; in the pall beneath the stormheads the foe's artillery at last broke off. We stumbled to the remains of the first camp, the one with the stockade of oak.

Dead and dying horses were everywhere, their riders seeking them in anguish to end their torment. Many had broken legs and backs. No sight is more heart-scoring than that of a riven beast, thrashing to rise on two legs or three. “I cannot endure this!” Rhodippe cried, meaning stand by out of honor, waiting for each animal's rider to find it so she herself could put it from its misery. I released my stick to this work. They doled their deliverance as swiftly as they could. Rain sheeted down. The stone where the enemy had bivouacked squatted grimy with wine jars and sacks of poppyseed, lentils, and peas. Refuse spread in a welter, bread in flat loaves, ropes of garlic, wallets of onions and radishes and leeks. One saw shields cast aside, and even stacked arms, which the defenders had abandoned, fleeing. Excrement mounded beneath straw in the slit trenches, steaming in the downpour. Upslope we could hear the Scyths, still brawling over the prisoners.

“Is this how it will go?” Chryssa put into words the revulsion each of us felt.

I ordered all to shut up and look to their arms and horses.

25

THE MUSICIAN'S REPORT

I
was summoned that night to assist in the interrogation of prisoners. This was at the main camp on the Hill of Ares. They did not need torture, these captives of the tent, just one peek at the Scyths outside.

Eleuthera did not oversee the interviews personally, being called to more urgent business. Her needs, we were told, were intelligence of the foe in three areas: water, food, and morale.

The fourth prisoner I questioned was a musician. This man, more even than his fellows, had been struck with horror by the chopping off of hands. He began to speak with such obvious truthfulness that I sent for the commanders to hear him. Glauke Grey Eyes and Skyleia arrived first, then Alcippe, and Hippolyta with Eleuthera, who took over.

By now the musician had recovered his courage. You could see him steel himself for torture and death. He would supply, he declared, no intelligence that might work harm on his countrymen.

To her credit Eleuthera resisted the application of terror. The musician had not been apprised of her identity and she did not volunteer it, introducing herself only as a captain of cavalry and friend of Athens. She admired the captive's spirit, she testified, and would honor the limits he set to his interrogation.

“Impart this only, my friend. What does Theseus tell the people? I admire your king and wish to make myself his student. Answer, please, and I will ask no more: By what arguments does your lord keep up the defenders' spirits?”

The musician balked. Not from fear, one felt, but delicacy, even chivalry. A faithful recounting of the king's words must offer insult to the foe, he said, meaning us. Sooner slay him now and get it over with.

Eleuthera ordered wine brought for the man and, taking the bench at his side, pledged impunity by Hecate and the Great Mother. The musician would not be harmed if he spoke the truth. Nor would he work injury to his country, merely by relaying its king's assessment of the foe.

It took some coaxing, and no lone noseful from the store of wine, but at length the fellow relented.

“Theseus tells the people first to have faith in our fortifications. The Acropolis is impregnable, he declares. He cites his travels throughout all Greece and the Eastern seas and proclaims our citadel the mightiest natural fortress on earth, unscalable and irreducible.”

No axe fell on the man's neck, no slivers were inserted beneath his fingernails. He settled, gaining confidence, and plugged on.

“With the Deep Spring, Theseus tells us, we draw water from an inexhaustible source. We have grain in abundance, and more coming in each night from Euboea through the porous lines of the foe. The Amazons and their allies cannot cross in force to the island, to which our wives and children have been evacuated; the foe does not have ships, and she fears the sea. The channel may be narrow, Theseus acknowledges, but our war vessels, even our ferries and scows, can beat back any ragtag armada cobbled together by the enemy.”

Eleuthera absorbed this soberly. “What else does Theseus say?”

The musician hesitated, fearing, he declared, to offer offense.

“Speak! We want truth, not flattery.”

“Theseus says those who besiege us, excepting the Lykians, Phrygians, and Dardanians, are wild tribes. They possess neither discipline nor patience, he contends. They cannot sustain a siege. Further, Theseus tells the people, the contingents of the Scythians and Thracians, Massa Getai and Thyssa Getai, are not the nations entire under command of their kings but wild young bucks, enlisted for plunder and adventure, and unofficered by any but themselves. Though born fighters, they are proud, fractious, and ungovernable. They can endure anything but tedium and will make any sacrifice save cooperation with an ally. They possess valor in quantities unquenchable, and when worked to a pitch of intoxication (as they invariably are, entering battle) will die three times before they fall. They are great fighters, Theseus tells us, but a bad army. We Athenians, on the other hand, may be poor fighters but a good army.”

The musician's throat grew dry. Eleuthera wet it.

“Further, our king attests, the wild tribes who besiege us despise one another. Their foremost delight is to steal each other's horses and carry off each other's women. To them the assault on our city is but a diversion in which they indulge for booty and novelty before returning to their habitual round of warfare upon one another. Further, the Amazons, though technically at the head of the alliance, are in fact hated by the other tribes, who are jealous of their independence and covetous of their lands and herds. The Scyths and Thracians would fall upon them in a heartbeat if they thought they had a chance to prevail.

“Theseus adds, of the Amazon commander Eleuthera, that she is the least likely to control such headstrong troops, as she is just like they are—rash, intemperate, given to impulse and overhaste, constitutionally incapable of compromise or coalition-building. She is the kind of leader, Theseus assures the people, who by her willfulness and arrogance will drive her allies apart from the Amazon cause. We defenders need do nothing to cleave the corps arrayed against us. Eleuthera will do it for us. The Amazons, Theseus declares, have only two leaders capable of commanding allegiance and obedience from all: Hippolyta, who at past sixty years lacks Eleuthera's war prestige, and Antiope—who stands with us.”

This testimony was received soberly, so true did it strike to the mark. “The besiegers' forces,” Eleuthera continued to the musician, “outnumber yours five to one. What does Theseus say to this?”

“He assures us the foe's numbers work against her. We need not fear their multitudes, Theseus says. The root of the Amazons' prowess is their horsemanship. He declares he has not seen the horse yet who can scale a wall or leap a twenty-foot battlement. The enemy has thirty-five thousand animals. How can she feed them? Not in Attica, that is certain. She must range afield, across the Isthmus even, while each raid she makes outrages more nations and converts more allies to our cause. The Amazons must find pasturage for their herds, not ranging over leagues of grassland steppe, but stuck here all year on fields of stone.

“But the enemy, Theseus declares, cannot remain in Attica another year. Her mares at home will foal in the spring. Even now foes encroach upon her lands. For the Amazons the war must be won by summer's end. Remember too, Theseus tells the people, that this country of ours is to these besiegers the ends of the earth. They don't want it. What can they use it for? They abhor it. They only wish to destroy us and go home.

“In sum, Theseus proclaims, the defenders need only hold patient to prevail. Athens need not defeat the enemy in battle. We need never set foot off the Rock. The foe will grow weary of this kind of warfare, to which she is not suited and within which her strengths, however magnificent on other fields, are neutralized. In the end she will give up and go home.”

The musician finished. His knees, even his ankles, quaked, so certain was he that this report would incite his captors' wrath. Nothing of the kind. Rather the acuteness of Theseus' understanding of our weaknesses and those of our allies struck the company mute.

“Your king owns a canny head, my friend. And you have done well not to seek to deceive us.”

Eleuthera ordered the musician fed and returned to his comrades in detention outside, but given no especial care that might draw attention to him and thus set him at peril of reprisal from his countrymen. He would be ransomed with the others and returned to the Athenian lines.

An expulsion of breath conveyed the prisoner's relief. Eleuthera had risen and turned to depart.

“One thing more . . .”

At the musician's words our commander turned back.

“They're scared,” the man appended.

Of what?

“Of you. Of women. Of women such as you.

“My countrymen are dread-stricken,” the musician explained, “by the Scyths and Thracians, who to them are beasts taking form as men. But of you their terror exceeds even this. Men fear to die at your hands as they would being devoured by wolves. You are monsters to them. You cannot be human, they believe, for how could gentle mothers, as must be the same in all lands, produce daughters like Gorgons and Hydras? Theseus, when he seeks to stanch the people's fears, makes this point alone: that you breathe air and bleed blood as we do. Few believe him. They think you have fallen from the moon, which you worship.”

Eleuthera inquired how Antiope was received by the Athenians.

“They approach her in awe, those who dare,” the musician answered, “and study her every move when she appears in public, which is seldom, so wretched does she seem at the woe she has brought to Athenian and Amazon alike. Yet men marvel at her; they ape her walk and speech. Many urge that she be armed to fight in our cause, thinking her the equal of Theseus and worth battalions on her own.”

Last, Eleuthera asked how much Antiope contributed to the counsel of Theseus. The musician answered that he could not know what passed between the pair in bed, but in the city it was well known that Antiope would not so much as step forth onto the battlements but remained in the citadel's innermost cloister, as if she could not bear to hear the fighting or receive report of its floods and ebbs.

The Scyths and Massa Getai returned past midnight. For hours Eleuthera wrangled with them and the other allies. We had won a mighty victory today. Yet our comrades chafed for want of plunder. I and others must produce prisoners, to bear witness to the gold held by Theseus on the Rock, nor were Borges and his fellows satisfied till several of these had expired under torture, so testifying.

Among the Scyths and Thracians, three commanders had emerged—Saduces, lord of the Tralliai; Hermon of the tribes east of the Strymon; and Borges of the Iron Mountain Scyths. They all wanted gold.

“You have sacked Attica entire,” Eleuthera replied in exasperation. “What of that?”

“It is gone,” declared Borges.

Eleuthera had already promised the allies half the treasure of the Acropolis. What more did Borges want?

“The men to kill. The women and children for slaves.”

They are yours, Eleuthera vowed. “But you will take my orders and fight the way I command.”

Borges wanted the prisoners, the ones taken this day. It was his way to demand and demand, and nothing but blood would make him stop.

“The prisoners go back to the Rock.” Eleuthera put a period to the debate. “Take more and I will send more back. For each is a belly Theseus must feed and a soul whose terror he must quell. Do not lose sleep, Borges. You will get them all in the end.”

When the session had adjourned, near dawn, I approached Eleuthera alone.

“And what is your complaint?” she demanded.

I took hurt at this tone. My friend saw it.

“Forgive me, Selene. This is the state to which I have been reduced by this relentless politicking.”

We walked together. She wanted to hear of the army. How were their spirits?

I told of my eleven. What had unnerved them most this day was not the unwonted manner of fighting, nor even the casualties among our comrades, but the fearsome toll this type of combat inflicted on the horses. The sacrifice of these noble beasts had broken our hearts, particularly in the fight's aftercourse, when we must destroy those shot and maimed and leg-broken. Interring our beloved mounts this night, I informed Eleuthera, many sisters had experienced a keener grief, it seemed, than for mates of womankind.

Eleuthera, I saw, shared this anguish.

“A warrior, however grievously slain, may be made beautiful in state,” she observed. “But a dead horse just looks dead. What sorrow cuts deeper than to raise the barrow over innocents fallen? No love, we think, may be greater than ours for them. Yet ours is nothing alongside that which they return. Tenfold they repay our devotion. They give and give, till their hearts burst beneath us, and, dying, seek only to give more.”

Our commander's voice broke. I felt her hand clasp mine. We drew up where we stood. She had become again the friend of my girlhood; love for her flooded my heart.

“Will you stay with me, Selene?”

She wished me to detach myself from my unit, serve with her in staff command.

“I need one at my side who loves me. I cannot bear this weight alone.”

Of course I would.

We walked farther, mounting the Hill of the Pnyx, overlooking the Athenian lines. I told her of a clash in camp this evening, with my sister. This was after the Fire Ceremony, the inhuming of the horses, when grief had left us all lacerated to the quick.

“I had given Chryssa an order,” I recounted. “She refused it. She challenged the whole conceit of giving orders. ‘It is not
rhyten annae.
Not the way we have always done it.'

“‘There must be discipline,' I insisted.

“‘Nobody ever bossed me before. And certainly not my younger sister! To appoint us officers over one another is
netome!
It is Eleuthera's doing, who hates the Greeks so much she has become just like them!'