Last of the Amazons (34 page)

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:

H
ere, 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.

Burials began. For days pyres burned in the camps of both armies. It seemed, Damon said, as if grief were the sole commodity the two sides still owned in abundance. The scale of the calamity, now that casualties could be tallied, overwhelmed both nations' capacity to absorb it. Further, the lines of the foes lay so close across from each other that each could witness the other's rites and attend his or her hymns of woe. From the Muses' Hill, Athenians looked on by the thousands as the Amazons interred Eleuthera. When it came time to raise the mound over Antiope, Theseus dispatched a runner to Hippolyta (who now held sole command of the invading army) to inform her that any would be welcomed who wished to attend.

The entire corps of Amazonia crossed over.

After this, rancor relented between the antagonists. Access to springs and wells, particularly the abundant Klepsydra and the Deep Spring within the Rock, was granted by the Athenians to the Amazons. Our countrymen permitted the foe to water her horses and provided a market for grain and food. The invaders let the defenders return to their farms. It came about that numbers of wounded Amazons were ferried to sites of recuperation on Euboea, while others found themselves tended by their former enemies within that bastion they had striven so mightily to surmount, the summit of the Acropolis.

Twenty-nine days after the final clash, terms of truce were ratified upon that site that would come to be called the Horkomosion, the House of Oaths.

That night the Amazons began to withdraw.