Last of the Amazons (9 page)

A bowl was redrawn; Father wet his throat and began. . . .

10

THE BIRTH OF DEMOCRACY

Father's testimony:

T
he first Athenian voyage to the Amazon Sea, whose course we now retrace, embarked some twenty years prior to this date. Theseus was thirty or thereabout, I twenty-five, my brother Damon twenty. Philippus, what were you—nineteen? Other veterans among our current corps were surely little older.

Why did the expedition sail? What was Theseus' object? To answer we must hark back to that hour of Athens's chronicle. Now pay attention, friends, and heed this recounting:

At that time, and for the first time, the warring baronies of Attica had been drawn into confederation. This was Theseus' doing. He had made them all Athenians. Such did not sit well with every headknocker. The princes, say, of Marathon or Aexone, held their fiefdoms jealously; when they met in council in the palace they brawled like barn cats. I was then a buck lancer of Theseus' corps and I can tell you, the place was a riot.

Theseus overturned this by a single stroke: he moved the sessions outdoors, to the hill of the Pnyx, where the people could attend and observe their betters. What a revolution this affected!

Before, within the walls of the palace, the knights could comport themselves as churlishly as they wished. Now before the eye of the commonwealth, they had to behave.

Theseus set his council throne on a ledge overlooking the platform and from this vantage governed the debate. Yet when he argued a brief himself, he made it a point to dismount this post of privilege and offer his opinion from the floor, as an ordinary citizen, so to say.

Again this alteration proved miraculous. For though it was clear that no baron could match the prestige of the king or the presence of the man, nonetheless the very fact of Theseus' voluntary condescension acted as a tonic of emancipation. He commanded the herald to convoke each session with the call, “Who comes forward with good advice for the city?”

Thus was rhetoric born, and the art of public speaking. But Theseus saw beyond an invigorated Council of Nobles. His vision forekenned that agency by which Athens would be elevated before all polities of the world: the participation of the people themselves.

In the heat of disputation, our king divined, no faction would limit itself to advocates of noble birth, but call forward all champions possessed of wisdom or skill in debate. This, Theseus abetted by his own hand. For when he spied a landsman, say, or grover daunted to orate before his betters, he set the
skeptron
himself in the fellow's fist and stood at his shoulder as he spoke.

How the hidebound revolted! Yet there is this and none may refute it: when a man, however mean of birth, speaks true, his words ring as gold. And if his counsel prove of utility to the commonwealth, foolish indeed is he who would despise it. So it came about that at Athens and Athens alone, any may speak and all listen.

Friends, I have trod the Lion's Walk of Mycenae and trekked the colonnade of seven-gated Thebes. These are not cities but courts. Royal courts. Nor are their peoples citizens, but subjects. They wait, dumb, upon their masters. “Aye” is their lone rejoinder, save “Milord.”

This was Athens too, before our king set her emancipation. Theseus gave her a voice, and this has made her the jewel and envy of the world. At Athens and Athens alone, a new stamp of person was being born, neither baron nor yeoman, but a man of the city. A citizen.

So enamored did men become of this liberated discourse that hundreds, my own father among them, took to overnighting in town, just to be near the action. With such concentration the city acquired a political energy unprecedented. On days when the Assembly didn't meet, the chorus did not tramp back to the farm, but picked up the tune on its own, in the marketplace. This body possessed no official standing; its findings carried no legislative weight. Yet what knight was so witless as to take a position in the big Assembly if it had failed first to carry the little?

The market became a kind of fore-Assembly. Here even saddler and butcher may speak. And speak they did! Parties began to form and these, maintaining cohesion issue to issue, cohered into blocs of influence. Now a new hare had hopped into the stew. This was the opinion of the public. Theseus understood that this game favored none so much as he. For who stands taller with the people than he who has set them free?

Theseus' rivals perceived his object, to elevate the commons as counterpoise to the nobility. Every inch of monarch's space he ceded, Theseus believed, came back to him twice in leverage over the gentle-born. Many princes grumbled, as they do today. And indeed a peril had arisen which even Theseus had not foreseen.

This was the disgruntlement of the younger nobles, the bucks his own age. These bloods, though surpassing all in strength, good looks, and venturesome spirit, yet tolled too callow in wisdom to make a showing in the Assembly. When they orated, catcalls descended; hisses chased them from the stand. They hated this. They abhorred the ascension of the people. And such was their power, this generation soon to inherit the land and treasure of Attica, that Theseus must disarm them with a counter or they might prove the shoal upon which the ship of state foundered.

Thus the voyage to Amazonia.

Thus the great adventure.

I recall our father summoning my brother, Damon, and me. Theseus had put out the call for volunteers. The king himself would sail in command; he wished three hundred as companions. The company would be gone a year, journeying to uncharted shores. I had no interest whatever. I was twenty-five and betrothed to my sweetheart; I had twenty acres I burned to bring under “man's ordering hand.” My brother had his own pursuits and felt the same.

Our father sat us down. “My sons, if you do not sail with Theseus, you might as well caulk your own crypts. For none who spurns this call will amount to a heap of dung.”

Father cited the champions already enrolled beneath the king's banner. Prince Lykos, the wealthiest and most brilliant youth in Athens; the hero Peteos; the chariot racer Bias and his twin, Tereus the wrestler. Father named Telephos, prince of Marathon; Eugenides the boxer, son of matchless Telamon of Salamis; Stichios, called Ox, lord of Itoneia; and Phaeax of Eleusis. Down the roster Father tolled, hailing champion upon champion. Even our mate Philippus was cited, youngest of four brothers, scions of the barony of Thria.

That buck who stays behind, our father pronounced, will be known ever after as lubber and laggard. While those who enlist in Theseus' company will be our monarch's mates forever, his table companions and lords of Attica.

The expedition, Father made us see, would afford each youth a field within which to display his mettle, and for Theseus to discover the best and brightest as his inner circle. Such was the cunning of our young king. He named his flagship
Silver Seed
in honor of Athena's olive and embarked with her squadron on the sixth of Elaphebolion, one month before the anniversary of that date on which as a youth not yet twenty years old he had sailed for Crete, slain the Minotaur, overthrown Minos the Great, and first set Athens on her ascent to glory.

11

BEYOND THE KEN
OF GOD

Mother Bones:

F
ather drew up at this point and, turning to Philippus, Aristocrates, and the others who had sailed with Theseus, inquired if his narration stood sound thus far. Philippus ratified with this emendation: that the object of the expedition had never been Amazonia.

“Our king burned to top Jason and the
Argo,
and Heracles as well. His vanity craved to set the mark higher than these rivals had, to sail up the Phasis, or trek, if he must, to where the griffins are said to guard the gold of the North.”

Father approved this point as well taken. “Indeed,” he resumed, “but such objects were tributary to what the king truly coveted: iron. Iron was dearer than gold. Iron for sword blades and spearpoints, helmets and arrowheads, body armor, and, most of all, iron for the slashing sword. We had bronze. Bronze was nothing. Theseus' goal was the country of the Chalybes, master metalworkers, and their capital, Ash City, where the faces of the chalk cliffs arose hundreds of feet, men said, pocked with smelting ovens and foundries, and the smoke of the smithies hung over the valley in a perpetual pall. Aboard his vessels our king carried eleven tons of olive oil, in hopes of trade, and a hundred and eighty amphorae of Thriasian wine, as cultivation of the vine, so we heard, was unknown in that province, but men dined on meat raw and mare's milk hot from the teat.

“As for the country of the Amazons, the expedition's intent was to bypass it entirely; the inhabitants were too warlike and the place possessed nothing we could use. That we fetched up there in the event was pure mischance—unless you call it fate, or what the Amazons name
netome,
‘new thing' or ‘thing of evil.' ”

I glanced to Prince Atticus as Father spoke. Clearly he was delighted to have his captain Elias reyoked to the cause and taking pleasure in it. As if sensing this, Father checked his narration. He begged the company's pardon for interrupting “a far keener bard”—meaning Uncle—when his tale was just hitting its stride. Father stepped down. No entreaty could induce him to remain.

“Damon, my friend”—Atticus turned to Uncle—“it seems we must have you again. Clearly the men are eager for your tale. Come forward, then, and pick up where you left off. Remember please that we younger men are understandably anxious about what perils lie ahead. Tell us, then, how it went with you as you sailed these same seas, when you were callow and untried as we are now.”

Let me assay a description of my uncle, for he cut at that hour a most singular figure. From his ordeal of the Underworld, both hair and beard had been charred so sternly that he had cropped them off entire; his crown was sheared to stubble. He felt this made him look ridiculous; in fact it rendered him quite dashing, displaying to effect the square cast of his jaw and the noble contour of his skull. He was forty then, and sturdy as a stag. One could not but take pride to call him kinsman. I thought, watching him step forth now into the firelight, that when that day came when I would be presented with a husband, I would favor indeed a fellow as striking and manly as my uncle.

He resumed, recalling his listeners to Athens and Theseus' seven-ship armada. This sailed north, as our present party, hugging the Magnesian coast. “I will skim over the ordeals of this passage, gentlemen, save to say that we endured two winter storms (as the vessels to reach the Amazon Sea at summer's commencement must depart two months before the start of the sailing season) which, although no more violent than the one this present company most recently survived, yet worked far graver mischief. At the height of the first gale two vessels collided,
Panope,
Prince Alcman's ship, and
Galateia,
gift of the League of Twelve States, shearing the former's steering gear. She was never seen again. At the mouth of the Strymon our companies were fallen upon by such hordes of orange-maned Tralliai, women as well as men, as packed the strand like ants. We lost another thirty there, and
Panegyris,
sister of
Silver Seed,
despite slaying three and four for every man.

“A second tempest succeeded, delivering such a drubbing as to start what few planks remained watertight after the first. Casualties had passed near a hundred now, and we still had not cleared Europe. We could not go home. How show our faces? Despair gripped the companies at our own conceit and want of preparation.

“The tribesmen of the east communicate like cicadas in a meadow; as soon as one hears, they all do. Report of our companies' enfeeblement preceded us on wings. Every sheep-bugger within a hundred leagues descended to take a run at us. No fighter is more cunning than the savage. He spies your vessels making for the spring you have spotted from offshore. Furtively he surrounds the site. He does not show himself, nor bend so much as a stalk, but contains his malevolence; he permits you to land, jug your water, even make camp and commence sacrifice. Then he strikes. From darkness, howling and painted black. Nor will he close with you man-to-man, but unleashes clouds of darts at a distance. If you stand, he flees. But only so far as to outrange you. Retreat one pace and he rushes again.

“Off Strymonian Thrace the ships could land only on the run. Past the Chersonese they could not land at all. We had no water. We must break into the wine, and choke it down neat, which served slender for thirst but hell for acrimony. When we cast the chip to reckon distance traveled, a silence oversettled all, for we knew that each league east was another we must fight our way out of, west.

“The winds hold contrary all summer in the Pontos. The longshore eddies are wicked; to stand out means advancing at the bare pole into a gale, breaking your back, while to pull inshore, seeking a seam, demands passing beneath bluffs lined with aborigines and points off which raiders may launch. Twice a day, it seemed, we rounded headlands to discover booms of catboats cutting off our passage. One mob of troglodytes even had nets! The only option was to stand out to midpassage, leagues across at this point. Into the brunt we must beat, but with ships incapable of pointing past square to square, it took all day to work a mile eastward. In the end we could make way only under oars and at night when the wind dropped.

“And yet miserable as it was—if you will forgive such phrase, my friends—I was having the time of my life. For the youngster, novelty is the currency of dreams. What could be more novel than this? Then too one stood never unmindful of the illustriousness of the company in which he ventured. To stand with such knights and heroes! Theseus, Lykos, Peteos! Stichios, Telephos, Eugenides! The meanest chap at oars was a prince, it seemed, and when we remembered mates at home, however carefree we conjured their hours, we wouldn't swap places for all the silver of Halizon.

“A youth loathes nothing more than his own callowness. Experience is his object. Experience, however ghastly, for the lad longs before all for the lined face and the chiseled squint of the veteran. Even his submissions to terror, the very shit with which he paints his thighs under fire is trophy to him; he points it out to his mates, laughing in the aftercourse of action as if it were a decoration for valor, which in its way it is, for it makes him a salt, a vet, an old hand. Nor may casualties or deaths, even of those dearest, faze him long. At night he settles, reckoning his accrual of experience as a miser his hoard, and gloats in the knowledge that nothing, not even God, may take it from him.

“The most appalling overthrow occurred on the south-facing coast of the Bosporus, just when we thought we were safe. A camp party had ventured ashore, running-in with one ship first, to clear the site and ring it with a palisade, while the others hove-to out of bowshot. The savages came out of nowhere, seizing three of our mates on the strand. Theseus ordered attack, but as soon as the ships entered the cove, small craft by the hundreds launched from the treeline, slinging darts and fire lances. These were Saii and Androphagi, Man-Eaters. The struggle surpassed in grisliness all heretofore, hand-to-hand along every foot of gunwale, our comrades bashing the skulls of slough-dwellers seeking to clamber aboard, while their mates, axe-wielding and mantled in animal skins, hacked at both oars and hull timbers. There is this to a clash with savages: they attack not in discipline or silence, but hooting and howling. It goes without saying they are shitfaced. They're having fun! Theseus fought like a maddened ox, as did his champions, Lykos, Peteos, Phaeax, Eugenides, Stichios, and Telephos. At battle's climax we lashed the ships together and defended them like a fortress on land. Only the stoutness of Greek armor and the fact that our companies fought downhill, ships against dugouts, held the swarming foe from hacking us to mince. When at last darkness and their own losses induced the tribesmen to give back, our complement discovered itself decimated by wounds and exhaustion, all four ships holed and nearly oarless, stuck a quarter mile offshore, in dead wind, with no means of regaining way. Worse, the savages still held our men they'd captured. What atrocities they performed upon these I shall never repeat, save to say that we must endure our mates' cries nightlong, not alone of affliction and despair, but of our own names, called upon in prayer for the boon of death.

“Theseus passed among the grief-stricken oarsmen, directing them back to work. Collect what axes remain and take down the masts and yards, he cried; shape these into oars. This chore, occupying the men with physical toil, preserved their reason. By midnight way had been reestablished; by watch's end the ships had pulled from sight of land. Not a man spoke, nor met his fellow's eye, with such woe was each riven. Further evil, we had lost our fire. That holy flame which had been kindled at the temple of Athena atop the Acropolis and borne with us across all these leagues, without which we could offer no sacrifice nor even light our brands and cookfires. What could we do now?

“We rowed. All day and all the next, men labored at oars, as if by putting distance between themselves and the site of their overthrow they could flee its consequence. Thunderstorms stalked without letup. The men toiled on in wretchedness. All feared they had sailed so far as to pass beyond the ken of God. Again Theseus sought to recall his cohorts to their manhood. ‘Zeus reigns even here,' he proclaimed. ‘Behold his bolts of fire!' No one listened. We had no more excrement with which to soil our ankles and no more piss to sluice into the bilges in terror.

“By the third morning the ships had reached new country, torrent-cut and densely wooded, with waterfalls visible at a mile. Atop one stretch a tableland extended, lit golden by the ascending sun.

“Horsemen could be seen tracking the squadron from this eminence. Theseus resolved to land, to entreat clemency of whatever tribe or nation held this country. We would hire out our swords, or our labor, to repay any kindnesses conferred. The vessels entered the haven, heaving-to beyond bowshot, with
Silver Seed
advancing alone to shore.

“Down came the riders at a walk. They were women. ‘Is this the country of the Amazons?' Theseus called. But the females could not savvy our tongue, and even the word Amazon meant nothing to them. The leader was about twenty-five, with a reddish-blond plait beneath the doeskin cap of Phrygia. Her companions were attired as she, in buckskin leggings with
gorytus
quivers at their horses' flanks, a bow and brace of javelins across the back. Clearly they were savages, yet with such knightly bearing did they sit their mounts that we who looked upon them were held spellbound and felt trepidation recede, supplanted by awe.

“And their horses! Here were no runt ponies such as one associates with the nomadic clans of the steppe, but strapping battle mounts, sixteen hands high, nobler than any in Attica or Greece entire. The redhead loosed a whistle. From concealment beyond the hill cantered a fourth rider, a girl no older than seventeen. To our relief this one spoke Greek, with a strong Aeolian accent; she called man
maun
and sky
skua
as they do.

“Theseus sketched our plight; our patronesses attended with gravity. The king was permitted to land. He identified himself by name, title, and city, assigning three others only—myself, Euphorus of Oa, and Eteocles of Marathon, all beardless youths, so as not to disquiet our benefactresses or overmatch their number. The warrioresses gave us game, two harts they had shot and bore across their saddles, if such a term may be applied to the frameless wolf-skin pads they made their seat upon, not ‘deep' as Greeks will, but high, as speed riders. We might help ourselves to water and forage as well, the huntresses declared, and remain on the site to repair our ships. This was their country, they confirmed; absent their sanction, no one might work harm to us.

“The women would return next day, they pledged, with more game and with
yourte,
fermented mare's milk, the staple of the region, it seemed. They would not approach nearer, however, but maintained their remove at half a bowshot. Nor would they dismount. Last, they left fire in a jar, which they bore with them, lit from no temple but Zeus' own bolt, they informed us. This heartened our company mightily.