Last of the Amazons (20 page)

At once cries burst from the Council:
Aii-ee! Ai-ee!
Even the sober elders whooped. Outside the chamber the tribes had massed in their multitudes. Hippolyta could hear the pages and heralds relaying her words and the roars of approval ascending in rejoinder. The queen rose, drawing the Council in her train, and emerged beneath the dark moon whose face is Hecate of the Crossroads, mistress of the track to hell, and, mounting the stand before the people, pronounced for their hearing all that had been debated and proposed within. The nations roared in approbation. Eleuthera looked on, watching the spark she had struck ignite to conflagration.

“As to the male nations of the steppe,” Hippolyta addressed the daughters of tal Kyrte, “let us not make war upon them but enlist them to our cause. I will treat with these myself, the Massa Getai and Thyssa Getai, Taurians, Maeotians and Gagarians, Mysians, Carians and Cappadocians. I will approach the Colchians and Chalybes and Issedones, Phrygians and Lykians, Trojans and Dardanians, Saii and Androphagai, the Black Cloaks and the Tower People, Saiian, Trallian, and Strymonian Thracians, the Royal Scyths and the Scyths of the Copper River. They will come for plunder and glory. Even those of the Iron Mountains will fight at our shoulders. They will be swept up as wildfire on the steppe!”

Acclamation saluted this. The cry of “Antiope! Antiope!” rang beneath the cresset flare of Hecate Dark Moon.

Two years it took to forge the alliance. But at last, at the floe-mantled straits of the Cimmerian Bosporus, the hour of departure had arrived. Two hundred thousand marshaled on the shore; the crossing buckled with drift ice gale-borne from Greater Scythia. The order of march called for the army to cross as a body following the night sacrifice to Cybele and Asia, but numbers of high-spirited novices, and particularly the horse troops of the Fox River clans, could not be held. They bolted onto the floe field, driving their mounts in that sport called
macronessa,
which is played with a stuffed skull wrapped in ox hide, and which they contested by torchlight all the way across.

To the brink of the ice the main body advanced. I rode Daybreak, trailing Knothole and Thrush, the first laden with bedding, armor, and spare arms beneath a bearskin mantle lapped across his chest to protect on the headwind marches. Kalkea and Arsinoe were my novices, trailing a string of eleven. Thrush bore a shell like Daybreak's but of elk and sable, atop which rode a pack frame balanced with sacks of parched oats and rye, as well as horsehair blankets, picket stakes and lines, windbreaks of ox-hide and ibex, which would be rigged each night to shield the stock. Both mounts wore hoodwinks, as did Daybreak, as cloaks against snow glare and gale-driven ice. Cured and fresh meat were sealed in bags of badger gut and stowed beneath the pack shell.

As to kit, I rode upon a half-frame wolf-skin saddle, with my crescent shield slung from the cantle behind my left thigh. On its face was my war totem, Selene Bright Moon, in ivory and gold, ringed with those annals, the celts and amulets commemorating each raid and fight, which comprised my history since girlhood and simultaneously shielded me from hazard and called forth by their placement and power further glory. I had crafted none, as was tal Kyrte's law, but each had either been won as a trophy or made for me (as I had for others) by lovers and friends. Quiver and bow case hung at Daybreak's right shoulder, both of doeskin with flaps of fox fur, quill-embroidered and trailing bands of ermine and mink. I packed twenty-seven primary shafts, straight and true, which had taken me two years to fashion, and another two score with Knothole in the spare kit. My bow was a four-footer of ash and horn with a grip of boar skin trimmed with amber and jet. In my right hand I bore the death lance of my “stick,” or fighting unit; six feathers of hawk and osprey, for comrades gone to the life beyond, pended from its tip. A buckskin trophy-fall hung at my back, with more glyphic annals, and seven scalps woven to tassels, which whipped and snapped in the wind. My boots were fireproofs of ox-hide lined with sable and fox; atop these, wolf-skin trousers with the fur on the inside, overmantled by leggings of buckskin. Twenty charms of electrum and silver were woven into a stripe down each leg, talismans of the gods and heroines into whose care I had surrendered my soul during the Gatherings of my youth. Around my waist I wore a star belt of seven windings, gift of Eleuthera. My breast was mantled with a vest of fox fur and fleece, thick as a hand, with an overcloak of bearskin, tightest against the wet, and a hood lined with the fur of white marten. Over my right shoulder rode a black panther skin, with the head still on, draping my back to form a pouch in which I carried my moon bundle. On my head I wore a Phrygian cap of doeskin lined with otter; its flaps shielded my ears, while through its forestall of horsehair, bound across my mouth and eyes, I could see into the sternest glare. My battle-axe I wore not as others in a scabbard between my shoulder blades but loose, across the tops of my thighs, in an antelope case lined with fleece. Daybreak's coat was shaggy with winter, a pile so thick it swallowed both fists to the wrist. You could hang by it at the gallop. On all sides warriors advanced in such pride, numbers, and brilliance as surely heaven had never looked upon before.

Hippolyta and Eleuthera had meant to leave a third of the nation behind, to safeguard our lands and herds. In the event, half of these could not be contained, but veterans and novices in thousands swept upon the column, leaguing with its squadrons and refusing to be driven off. I was there when the clans of the Titaneia marshaled before the strait. Uncommanded they set fire to their tents and waggons. Everything they owned beyond what could be borne to battle, they torched and good riddance. The Lycasteia followed, and the other tribes of tal Kyrte; even the Scyths and Taurians, the Massa Getai and the clans of the Caucasus were caught in the fever. As the storm of smoke sheared skyward, the corps as one put up the Hymn to Ares Manslayer.

Victory or death

Victory or death

No outcome other

Victory or death

What treasure was going up in smoke! The merchants who tracked the army could not bear it, but dashed in among the tents, seeking to retrieve items of value. The column burst into laughter, succeeded by cheers. In and out of the flames the vendors shuttled, cloaks smoking and beards scorched, to snatch the prize of a copper skillet or emerge triumphant bearing a Mysian carpet.

The horn sounded. The column stepped off onto the floe. At its head advanced a picked company founded by Hippolyta's order: Antiope's company, with Sneak Biscuits led, riderless, at its fore. Before Athens's walls this corps would be drawn up and our lady summoned to step down and assume its command.

I fell in between Stratonike and my sister Chryssa in the battalions of our nation, the Lycasteia. Never had my heart swelled so; I must bury both fists in my horse's coat simply to keep from pitching faint. My glance found Eleuthera at the column's crown. She was right: tal Kyrte had gone too long without war. War is what we were born to, daughters of Ares. We had drifted apart from ourselves by falling away from war. Let us return to it and to the ground of our greatness!

Ai-ee! Ai-eee!
The column spurred onto the field of ice. An image of Damon ascended before me. I banished it with hate. Who was he to me but that demon, as his name, who had bewitched my heart and estranged me from myself and from my people? Let him fall beneath my axe and hell take him!

The army swept in lines onto the frozen strait. It was impossible not to look right and left; we all did, and when we saw what a magnificent body we composed, an emotion of awe and humility overcame us. I glanced to Stratonike and saw she wept. I said nothing then; not till the far bank, which took all morning to reach, when the army doubled and redoubled, linking with the clans of the Taurians of the northern steppe and the massed companies of the Rhipaean and Iron Mountain Scyths.

I fell in at Stratonike's shoulder. “Why did you weep, sister, back there when the corps first advanced onto the ice?”

Chryssa rode at our friend's other flank; remarking my question she too drew in closer to hear the reply. Stratonike's gesture swept across the seabound plain, indicating the spectacle of the massed armies of the East.

“It struck me,” she said, “beholding this host and reckoning the scale of its daring, that none of tal Kyrte will return to this place the same as we are now. Even if heaven grants us victory, that life we knew is over.”

Stratonike's words chilled me, as I saw they did my sister. For moments we three rode in silence. Then Chryssa spurred and straightened, facing into the gale.

“Then may hell take me in battle before the walls of the foe, for I wish to remain above the earth for no life other than this I love.”

BOOK SEVEN

ATHENS

22

THE USES OF ECSTASY

Damon:

T
he first tribesmen into Attica were Fox River Thracians. Their numbers were about three hundred. They torched farms at Aphidna and Hecale and swept round the shoulder of Parnes into Paeonidae and the outer boroughs. At the same time troops of Sindic and Alanic Scyths punched south out of Thebes, cresting Cithaeron at Eleutherai and Oinoe, breaking through to Acharnae via the Parnes-Aegaleos gap. The date was Munychion thirteen, two years and seven months since Theseus' ships had made their forced decampment from the Mound City, bearing Antiope home as the bride of our king. One might imagine, reckoning the scale of the army marshaled to take vengeance upon us, and the hundreds of reports of its advance received at Athens over the succeeding two years, that no exertion would have been spared to prepare the citizenry and to fortify the state. On the contrary, accounts of the plains nations' mobilization were dismissed as fiction and fabulation. Tall tales arrive with every ship, so Athens believed, and poets routinely send children quaking to bed with bugbears of centaurs and Amazons. The very scale of the foe's undertaking confuted its credibility. Who could believe the unbelievable? That a ragtag confederation of savages, indeed savages perpetually at war with one another, could summon the cohesion to pack up and vacate their homelands, trekking three months across hostile territory, in the dead of winter, no less, and toward a site that was, to them, the extremity of the earth, all in the cause of repatriating one lone absconded female . . . this was preposterous. It could not happen.

Indeed, my friends, I anticipate your next query. Reports from fifteen hundred, two thousand miles away in the Chersonese, even five hundred miles off in Thrace, yes, you say, such could be dismissed, citing the remoteness of their sources and the hyperbole common to all tale-tellers arriving from foreign lands. But the Amazons had been within a hundred miles for days! Was no alarm received, even then, at Athens? Had no warning come from our allies at Thessaly or Thebes?

I answer thus. A Greek commander might have held his forward elements until the main body could be massed for the attack. Amazons and Scyths did not think like that. Once their advance parties struck the frontier, no curb or injunction could hold them back. They went after every stick of loot they could lay their fists on.

Why had no warning come from Thebes? Simple: the main body of the foe had not even reached Thebes! Her vanguard shot past on the fly. Why assault walled cities on the way in? Cut them off to starve! Pick them clean on the way home!

By the second day Athenian cavalry had got out into the countryside, if you can call an undermanned posse of ring riders and parade prancers by such a name. I rode with Philippus, keeping on our own. We identified Rhipaean and Ceraunian Caucasians later that day and, toward nightfall, the first clans of Greater Scythia. These were all males. And not in mass but small groups, raiding parties. My mate and I fled from them at first. But they had no interest in us. They were after fatter kills—cattle and farms and estate houses. Each gang competed with its cronies. One band would set-to, torching a farmstead; another would gallop past, whooping in derision. The first, fearing its fellows would beat it to choicer pickings, now jilted the original kill and made off at hot spur to overhaul its rivals.

This was no joke. For the foe's numbers and the astonishing swiftness of his assault had put him in command of the countryside before the citizen populace could be alerted, let alone evacuated. Our compatriots must flee to the city now, not over secure roads in Athenian possession, but across country already overrun by the foe.

Now a more perverse crick arose. This was the farmers themselves: they would not quit the land. You know north Attica, my friends; the yeomen live on leeks and poached hares; they are mean as dirt. They would not budge. All day Philippus and I lurched from hold to hold, crying the peril. Will you credit: no one believed us, or if they did, told us to take it to hell. They would dig in, to stand or die.

What mule is more stubborn than the bumpkin? Philippus and I bullied and pleaded, invoked Theseus' name, not to say every local god and hero we could think of. No use. These garlic-grubbers had set their bowels. They would defend their miserable patches, they and their sons, with stones and meathooks and bare hands.

We reached my brother's farm around sunset. The place had been razed to bare stone. The raiders, Copper River Scyths, had scalped two of the hands and chased Elias' bride into a dry well, raining rock and rubble upon her until they tired of this sport. She was all right, but cut up pretty badly.

The second dawn we saw Amazons. Not clans of the Lycasteia and Themiscyra we knew, but Chadisia and Titaneia. They swept south, seeking what? the city? the southern passes? Where Philippus and I remained, at Acharnae rallying the crofters, one encountered not Amazons but Scyths. The natives believed now. But a new pigheadedness had taken them. They would not make for the city proper (too newfangled for them) but fell back on the upcountry keeps, the strongholds of the local barons. Countrymen breaking for town now paid hell for their tardiness. On the road the Scyths overran them in mass; cross country they rode them down one by one. The Scyth is an impaler. He spikes skulls and nails hides to trees. Numbers of our own sought to hide in garners or root cellars. This is raw meat to the Scyth. He sights a likely covert and falls upon it with fire. He spits the first bugger he flushes; this one gives up the rest. We saw men scalped and still living, disemboweled and staggering with the spool of their guts in their fists. To prize off a finger ring is not the Scyth's style. He hews the hand entire and frees the band with his teeth. He will hatchet a head to gain an earring, scattering the pulp to his dogs, or that army of curs, self-recruited, which scavenges the banquet wherever he treks. Nor will you cheat the Scyth by stuffing goodies up your bum. He carves this as a house dame a goose and buries his arm to the elbow. God help those matrons who sought to stash treasure anywhere but in their purse.

As for me, I had my own problems, namely evacuating my father and his kith. These codgers had dug in, intractable as goats. I had to truss the old man hand and foot, he spewing oaths the while, and pack him in on a two-wheel cart. Next my uncles and their people, who at least acceded to reason, not to say the sight of a troop of Thracian Saii torching their neighbor's barns. Then my own poor patch. I owned only one item worth an iron spit—a colt named Tanglefoot I had hoped to race. Two sisters of the overhill farm, Gaia and Maia, had been my jockeys. They were twelve, twins, superlative riders. I set Gaia on this horse and her sister on another, ordering the lot to town. But at Holm Oak Hill, so I was apprised later, the lasses' party drew up across from a cohort of Amazons. Gleaning but one glimpse of these warrioresses (and that at above a quarter mile), the twins fell smitten. At once they forswore allegiance to nation, hearth, and gods, and flew to the foe, who welcomed them, as clearly they had scores and hundreds of others. Nor would these maidens come back.

To war's wonted horrors had been added such grotesque inversions. A state of hysteria gripped the populace. The defenders beheld their assailants driven on by
lyssa
and
outere.
It was this ecstasy that struck the deepest terror, for it called our own wives and daughters like the horns of the moon. Men's slumber was riven. Children sensed this upending of order. They wailed nightlong and no remedy could pacify them.

No one slept the next three days. A man rode to exhaustion, collapsed where he stood, then got up and went at it again. Our troops defending the city could not be called an army. They were militia. Farmers and shopkeepers, grovers and vineyardmen, many armed with only billhooks and mattocks. The knights of the baronies alone could be called warriors. These at least could ride and fight. But the more desperate the peril became, the more pressure each prince felt to defend his own stronghold, city be damned, so that numbers of nobles, even those who called themselves companions to Theseus, balked in the event and could not forsake elders and retainers and ancestral lands. In the end barely fifteen hundred knights rallied behind the city walls.

Philippus and I linked with these on the third day. Theseus led the troop out. The riders were all good men, stoutly armed and organized into companies. The Amazons toyed with us. I was with a cohort of three score on the plain near Thria when two wings of thirty warrioresses fell upon us. We formed a skirmish line, armed with saber and javelin. The enemy were Titaneia Amazons, holding our corps in such contempt as to send even their novices. They attacked with the bow and the battle-axe. We could not touch them. Three shafts each the foe loosed, the first at range as she approached, the second at the rush, the third point-blank as she ripped past. If one found its mark, the shooter wheeled upon her prey, sinking shaft after shaft, and when he dropped she fell on him with axe and scalping knife.

In the city men toiled without intermission, throwing up walls and breastworks, packing in rations and materiel. Shore roads teemed with evacuees bound for every cove and strand between Phaleron and Marathon, where husbands packed wives, children, and stock aboard smacks, bumboats, galleys, lighters, barges, any bucket that would float, to be ferried across to Euboea. Night and day the armada shuttled. On the shingle Theseus' paladins detained those able to fight and confiscated the treasure of all evacuating. Every bauble and trinket must be recruited to the city's need, to bribe the foe, fortify the ally, buy our way out if we could.

On the sixth night the citizenry, or what ragged portion remained of it, rallied in the city before the Temple of Hephaestus. A downpour had turned the square to mire. I arrived at the tail of the opening motion. I had never witnessed such a riot.

The throng called first for Antiope's surrender. Turn the bitch over to the foe! She was the cause of this calamity! Pack her off and hell take her!

Theseus confronted the multitude. Antiope was his bride, the mother of his son. If she went, he went.

Panic now seized the assembly. The people dared not call their king's bluff; without him they were cooked and they knew it. Their posture reversed, dropping all notice of Antiope, demanding instead an end to democratic assembly and the accession of Theseus to supreme command. With one voice the mob called their king to the post of
autokrater,
commander without appeal.

Theseus refused.

The square seethed like a cauldron. The mob, above six thousand densely packed, no longer conveyed its convictions by speech, but swept in mass from one bank to the other. Men did not vote by show of hands, rather migrated physically from shore to shore within the square, crying their posture. Theseus put this question to the people: Fly or stand? The riot redoubled. Men literally seized one another, citizen seeking to convert citizen by brute fervor. I saw my cousin Xenocles with his claws about the throat of some hapless bugger, who choked back with matching zeal, while two others sought to lift both and bear them bodily across the square to where the adherents of their own position had taken station.

Three times Theseus set the motion before the people. Three times the mob refused to respond, calling instead for his accession to supreme command. Take over! Tell us what to do!

The king would not do it.

He would compel the people to rule themselves.

Remember at this hour it was by no means certain that the city would be defended. Half the citizenry, even those now within the walls, were loading up to flee. The enemy had not yet sealed Attica. You could still get through. You could still get out.

Theseus reconvoked the debate: Stand or fly?

The downpour continued to pelt the square. Men were torn; some who had lost farm and family wished to quit with their lives; others in matching straits burned to fight, believing they had no more to lose. Some who retained lives and property wished not to hazard these by resisting the foe, while more in the same case shouted that to fly was to give up life and property both! Meanwhile numbers, perhaps two fifths of the state, had decamped to their home baronies, the upcountry holds. Two thousand had taken refuge on Mount Hymettos; more camped at Ardettos and Lykabettos, and in strongholds on Parnes. Others aimed to ferry to Salamis or Troezen, or shoot the isthmus to the Peloponnese. No few hoped to fly to Sicily or Italy, even Libya and North Africa.

Past midnight couriers came in. The foe had captured the last passes over Parnes and Cithaeron. Eleusis had been taken; the enemy held the Thriasian highway. Further terror was produced by the arrival of a runner from the Isthmus. This too had fallen, eliminating all escape by land.

The invaders had sealed Attica. Athens was surrounded and cut off. Had Theseus anticipated this? Had he stalled the Assembly till the foe had done his work for him? Many have asked in subsequent season; he has said only, “The people voted aright.”