Last of the Amazons (22 page)

She had crossed back within now, to a chest whose outlines I could just make out in the sudden gloom, and, employing the key she wore on a chain about her neck, opened it. She withdrew her
pelekus,
the double axe with which she had slain Prince Arsaces in the duel at the Mound City.

“Only one deed can stop this war: the slaying of Eleuthera. She is the invading army's heart. Kill her and the host packs up for home.”

She regarded me. “Yet who is a match for this greatest of warriors? Not Theseus, for all his strength and valor. Eleuthera is too quick for him. She will not let him close with her, nor is he her equal, for all his prowess, in mastery of arms. One-on-one she will beat him. And his pride will make him duel her one-on-one.”

Antiope had not spoken in my direction throughout. Nor did she now, rather offered this address to herself or some unseen token, myself present as witness alone.

“Only one champion is a peer for Eleuthera.”

She meant herself.

“Yet my husband forbids this. He has exacted this pledge from me, never to offer such action, even if the city fall or he himself be driven down beneath the onslaught of my countrywomen.”

The Amazon turned at last in my direction.

“Do you know why I summoned you, Damon?”

I did not.

“To kill you.”

She lifted the
pelekus
in its sheath of oiled fleece. “You are my size. Your tunic will cloak me. I bind my hair like yours and mask my face within the shadow of your helmet. I walk out the gate and take my place among my people. Nothing less will make them withdraw.”

She met my eyes.

“But I cannot do it. This is how weak I have become.”

She regarded the axe within its sheath. Here was no mean instrument, but a two-hander, stout as a woodsman's oak feller. I have seen many heft such a weapon. None held it like this Amazon. She turned from it to me.

“There is one other way this war may end.”

I waited.

“If I am dead.”

I begged her not to speak so.

“If I am dead, the object of the invasion no longer exists. Yet I must not perish by my own hand, for none would credit this, nor by homicide, which would inflame my people's wrath the more. Only in one way will my death produce a period to this conflict. I must fall in battle. In battle against my own.”

With a tug she released the thong which bound the axe's sheath.

“My husband has divined this. It is why he has commanded that no man arm me, nor place me at hazard in any way. Do you know why he does this?”

I did not.

“To preserve my soul. Which will be lost, he believes, if I raise this arm against those who love me.”

The lady forced my eyes to meet hers.

“The hour will come, Damon, when I must break the vow I have made to my beloved and arm to fight against my own. I will call you then. Will you come?”

The lady read the query which must have shone like flame in my eyes. Why me? Why not any page or squire?

As gently as a mother tugs the caul from her infant's curls, so did the Amazon slip the sheath from the double axe. “A warrior of tal Kyrte may be armed only by one who loves her. This is why I summoned Selene before the duel at the Mound City. And why I call you now.”

At these words my brow flushed.

“You love the wild ways, Damon, as you love Selene. That love has twinned you with her and me and our lord the king. And with this child.”

She advanced before me. With a shock I realized I yet held the babe. Before his face the lady now extended the axe, side-on and gleaming like a mirror. The child gurgled in delight; his chubby fist extended. Antiope tugged the blade clear.

“In the name of that love and of both our peoples, I beseech you, Damon: come when I call. Wrap me, I beg you, in my death armor.”

Stone steps descended from the palace to the Square of Erechtheus atop the summit, congested now with bivouac tents and outdoor kitchens, facing the precinct of Athena Polias, Protectress of the City. A page was waiting when I came out. He conducted me down the Three Hundred Steps, past the sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos and Persuasion, the goddesses by whose aid our king had united the warring baronies of Attica, and across the sprawl of defense works to where Theseus now labored atop the Enneapylon, reinforcing the breastworks of the Seventh Gate. Gangs in hundreds sweated in the sun; the king labored too. This was how one was granted audience with the lord of Athens. You picked up a stone and toiled at his side.

Theseus offered only a glance in my direction, but in it I read plain: the couriers had reported my reception by the lady Antiope. “To what did she make appeal, my friend? Love of Athens or of Selene?”

“Both, my lord.”

Before I could incriminate myself, the king eased me from the scaffold.

“I cannot let Antiope arm for battle, Damon. Not only for reasons of her honor, to avert the treason that such an act would constitute in the eyes of her people and of herself and of the world, nor for my own self-interest, the loss of her love, which I could not endure. But for the preservation of the state. And more: of the ideal of self-governance that Athens has come to embody and exemplify.”

He regarded me, grave as a ghost.

“I should never have taken Antiope from her people. Some god must have addled my wits. But once taken, she must be defended to the extremity. This is the canon of kings and the ordinance of sovereign states.”

His look inquired if I understood.

“If the king cannot defend his house,” he said, “he cannot defend his kingdom. He fails—and Athens fails with him. Even victorious, the city's ideal falls. This cannot be permitted! Let me die defending my beloved, let the city herself fall—yet Athens's ideal lives on. But for me to survive, for the city to endure, losing Antiope? This is the solitary outcome which cannot be countenanced. Do you understand, Damon? May I have your oath, you will not arm her?”

I pledged. The king set his hand upon my shoulder.

“You imagined we had entered unknown country, my friend, when we voyaged across the sea to Amazonia. Yet that was nothing beside the frontier I cross each evening with this woman who is my equal. Each dawn new continents are sighted; each night one alights on shores where no man's sole has trod.”

He laughed and squinted toward the Hill of Ares, barely a bowshot away, upon which sprawled the central camp of the Amazons. “Have you found Selene yet?”

Several times, I replied, at Coele and south beyond the Temple of Herse and Pandrosos.

“My lady summoned you this day,” our king instructed me, “because of your love for Selene. She sees you two as a set to herself and me, like pairs of fire dogs in a hearth.” He clapped my back with a laugh. “Give thanks you have only to duel Selene, my friend. God help you if you must love her.”

It is a terrible thing to be a king, especially a great one, for one must serve ideals of spirit at the price of lovers of flesh and blood. Who profits from a king's fidelity save generations a thousand years unborn, and which of his works will they recall at that remove, or care?

BOOK EIGHT

SISTERS IN
ARMS

24

AN ARMY
OF CARPENTERS

Selene's testament:

F
or another month the Athenians fought us. If their manner of warfare could be called fighting.

Skyleia broadcast her outrage in night council. “God has birthed these Greeks from his ass! Have they no shame? I have run out of insults, seeking to draw these rodents from their dens. Who has seen this? Not even a rat fights with such want of chivalry!”

Roars seconded this. Stratonike spoke: “Where is the honor in dueling those who huddle behind walls and within holes in the ground? They sally to daylight as beetles, trundling their shields before them like balls of dung!” That day, the ninth in a row, our companies had routed the foe in the open, only to have him tuck tail and scurry behind his battlements, from whose heights he launched stones from ramps and machines. Stratonike howled at such abdications of honor. “I will not fall, crushed like an insect! Where is the fame in this?”

The Scyths and Massa Getai added their outrage to the chorus, though for another reason.

“No gold in this country!” This was Borges' complaint, himself blind-soused three hours before midnight. His men could find neither horses nor cattle on this godforsaken promontory, he proclaimed, but only leeks and goats.

Prince Saduces of the Thracians arose, attempting a case for siegecraft. Our army must build walls of circumvallation, set sappers to dig tunnels, construct siege towers and rams. He was shouted down by knights of all nations, despising this vocation of drudges.

Glauke Grey Eyes seconded her sister Stratonike's contempt for the foe. “Who would display a scalp from men of Athens? Behold their potbellies and spindly shanks. We duel not knights but carpenters!”

Makalas, prince of the Chalybes, backed Saduces, emphasizing the strength of the enemy's position and urging that we, the allies, make study of siegecraft.

Alcippe Powerful Mare told the army's answer. “I know all I need to know of siegecraft. It is warfare shorn of honor.”

Ecstatic citation acclaimed this.

“At home,” Alcippe railed, “if someone ordered me off my horse to root in the muck like a sow, I would flay him on the spot. Now I do it all day! What are we becoming, protracting this siege? We will turn farmers, or worse!”

“Indeed,” Skyleia picked up the tirade she had initiated, “we came to this war as innocents. We imagined we could shame the Athenians, as any warrior people, either compelling them to face us and be defeated or, by driving them behind their walls, heap upon them such ignominy as to render them impotent forever.

“We were wrong. The Athenians have no shame. I despise them! Their land is so poor they have no deer or lions but only hares, and scrawny at that. What kind of people inhabit such a country? Who elects to gnaw green berries and dry crusts? I hate this place!”

When the army had cheered itself out and had at last, it seemed, spent its outrage, Eleuthera rose.

“Sisters, no act would afford me greater satisfaction than to show my backside to this sump hole. I squat over it! I piss upon it!”

Clamorous acclaim saluted this.

“I would load up this instant and leave these catamites to steep in their own offal. But hear me, sisters and allies. If we pack up now, the very shamelessness by which our enemies confound us will be invoked by them to claim victory.”

Howls of outrage ascended. Eleuthera signed for silence.

“Yes, victory. For what is victory but the driving of the foe from the field? Give Theseus this: he is a genius. And his discovery consists in this debasement of virtue—to prevail at the sacrifice of honor. This is the Athenians' invention, by which they will overturn all that is free and noble in the world.”

The throng roared, indignant.

“Therefore I say: We may not pull out. We may not permit these vermin to claim victory by boring us to death or stupefying us from want of action!”

Riot acclaimed this.

“Further, we must not content ourselves with besting these mechanics as we would knights upon the steppe—that is, by counting coup and allowing them to live. We must wipe them out utterly, as an abomination upon the earth and an affront to heaven! Exterminate them to the last man! Enslave the last child and woman! Burn all to the ground! For the crime these reptiles have offered is that most abhorred by heaven, to degrade not only themselves but all who hold to honor and the warrior's code!”

For ten days attacks redoubled. Our cohorts overran the last suburbs. The foe fell back to the town. The wall defending this was unfinished. It was nothing but the facings of houses (so squat one could vault to its summit with a leap from her horse's back) with alleys and lanes bricked up in between. Sections were not even breastworks, but palisades of hides and wicker. We must storm this and root these swine from their sties.

Eleuthera attacked at the thirty-second dawn. Before the Rock had emerged from shadow, Theseus and his champions broke in disorder. Companies of tal Kyrte punched through the ramparts in a hundred places. Taurian and Lykian infantry swarmed into the borough of East Melite. The clans under Borges cut off two thousand of the foe on the Hill of the Muses; the Scyths swept into Itoneia. The enemy reeled rearward on every front; it seemed the assault would drive him all the way back to the base of the Rock. But pockets of resistance held. The maze of the town frustrated horse tactics. How could one fight in such a labyrinth? Past noon the Athenians, resisting with unwonted stubbornness, recaptured two key salients—the Temple of Herse and Pandrosos and the Square of the Return—from which, when these companies linked with their cut-off troops on the Hill of the Muses, they were able to mount counterattacks on vulnerable flanks of our allies' advance. Give the foe this: he would not quit. It took till the descent of darkness to root him off the Muses' Hill and drive him back into the city. Eleuthera ordered the town razed to its paving stones. This was more easily said than done, however, as the knights of tal Kyrte would stoop to such labor no more than Borges' Iron Mountain Scyths or any of the mounted clans of the steppe, to whom such toil is degrading and abhorrent. Yet it must be done, for without leveling the town, the camps of our army, now throttling the city like a noose, remained vulnerable to counterattack. If Theseus elected to break out in force (and he was canny enough to see that he must), we would be dueling his shield-trundling rabble within a rabbit warren of streets that could not be defended on horseback. We would find ourselves back where the day had started: clashing in a maze of lanes and alleys, within which the might of our mounted cohorts was, if not overturned, then at least neutralized. We must attack. An assault must be mounted at once against the walls of the city, behind which the foe had been, for the moment, driven—that is, the Outer, or, Lykomid Wall and, behind and above, the Nine Gates and the towers of the Half Ring. All must fall. We must drive the enemy to the summit of the Acropolis itself.

Among tal Kyrte, the unit of cavalry is called a “stick.” Its complement is eleven (though some in raids are small as four or in sweeps as great as thirty). A stick's string is forty-four, four horses for each woman. Its trikona is twenty-two, maidens and novices in support, each with her own mount in addition to those of the string, and as many more as she can carry, meaning feed and find time to tend.

These were the warriors of my stick on the day the divisions under Eleuthera assaulted the Lykomid Wall: Anthea, called “Torch”; Arge Fleet; my sister Chryssa; Bremusa, “Blur”; Hesione, who fought with the
macerra,
the ten-foot pike; Calliste, “Beautiful”; Euippe, who had taken seven scalps at the Tanais; Theodora, past forty years and strongest of the lot; Scotia, “Dark”; Rhodippe Red Mare; along with our eager recruit of Thrace, Dosteia, called Stuff.

My own horses were Daybreak, Knothole, Thrush, and Snakebite, the last my night horse though Knothole, so named for his toughness, moved surefootedly in the dark as well.

This was one stick. Above a thousand comprised the corps, with seven hundred more, give or take, of our male allies. With this, my own, I would take on twice its number, the cream of any nation.

The attack came on the forty-first day. Here was how it went:

The buildings of the outer town had been broken up, as much as one could such a hive hewn of stone, isolating the city behind its Outer Wall, the Lykomid. The wall was no unbroken rampart, however, but the foe had erected redoubts and salients before it at sites of vulnerability. Staked ditches broke up the approaches. The defenders' outcamps at the west were three, at the crown of inclines fronting the Sacred and Panathenaic Gates and at the outer bastion which shielded the Nine Gates. Each was manned by about two thousand, protected likewise by staked ditches and palisades. The slopes north and east of the Acropolis had been quit by tal Kyrte. Too steep to attack. The assault would concentrate on the south and west, beneath the Hill of Ares. The northernmost redoubt fronting the Nine Gates was called the Ravelin. This was the bulwark my stick would attack.

The honor of comprising the first wave went to the Themiscyra, Hippolyta's tribe, and to prince Saduces' Trallian Thracians, all mounted archers, reinforced by elements of the Saii, armored as shock troops, with knights of the Massa Getai and Thyssa Getai fighting on foot. My unit was in the third wave, with six others of the Lycasteia and eight of the Titaneia. The plan was to assault with male infantry first; the wings of horse would follow when these had punched through. It looked good sketched in the dirt. We painted up and made our prayers. Mine was this: that should I encounter Damon across the line of battle, I would own the courage to cut him down. Between the Hill of the Pnyx and the Hill of the Muses, Eleuthera drew up four thousand horse, a mixed company of Lykians, Dardanians, and Amazons. These were to sweep the field once our assault had initiated the rout.

The battle was preceded by Eleuthera drawing up the cohort of Antiope, with Sneak Biscuits riderless at the fore, and calling to the foe's camp for our mistress. Volleys of obscenities came back. Before the line, the priestess sacrificed a black ram to Hecate. The hymn to Ares Manslayer resounded. The attack began.

I had never commanded before, that is, been responsible for lives other than my own. The experience was excruciating. How can one take care for even her own survival, let alone that of others? I ranged the line as the corps marshaled, exhorting vigilance. “Don't look so serious,” my sister called. “We won't fall off!”

With a cry the male infantry charged out. I have never seen men so drunk. The line was littered with discarded skins and “nosefuls.” Still they were magnificent, the Getai with their fox-fur shakos and ten-foot pikes, the Saii pushing fire waggons with tinder prows bigger than warships. Our cavalry squadrons were supposed to hold till the foe had been engaged. But riders and horses became so excited they could not be contained. Sticks of the Titaneia, the two foreranks, bolted onto the field, overtaking the foot troops before these had got within a furlong of the walls. Within ten heartbeats the trick had broken down to fiasco.

The course was all uphill, white limestone crazed with fissures, the worst footing imaginable for a mounted charge. The horses' hooves skittered on the stone; mounts spilled, fouling the squadrons laboring up the slopes behind. Attacking uphill the horses presented their breasts to the missiles of the foe, who had the advantage of slinging from above, so that our troops in the assault entered the beaten zone of their artillery a hundred feet before they could bring their own weapons to bear. A hundred feet is an eternity under fire. The Athenians bawled from the heights and let fly. Neither Scyths nor Thracians succeeded in breasting the works nor even attempted to, but beat across on the oblique, launching their volleys and coming about amid wild but empty whooping. Not one shaft in a hundred found its mark. All that prevented calamity was the terror of the Athenians. These were either the rabble of the city, or their betters performing as rabble, the main so addled with liquor they could barely stand. I saw man after man make to sling his stone and literally drop it onto his toes, so pissed or terror-befuddled was he.

Three times the lead units of Amazons and Scyths hurled themselves into the assault; three times they fell back. My stick still hadn't budged. We had actually dismounted, lashing ox-hide shoes about our mounts' hooves for footing, when a cry came from the slope to the left. The lines began moving. I could see nothing. “Strap up!” I bawled, more to inspirit my own outfit than from any intelligence of what was going on. We spurred up the stone.

The face was in natural stair steps, hurdle-high, so that the rider must scissor heels, knees, and thighs with all her strength, while with each vault and leap, her seat made to skid over her mount's hindquarters. I could feel my arrows jamming like jackstraws in their quiver; I had to take my bow in my teeth; my axe slammed so hard between my shoulder blades I could feel its whetted edge bursting the sheath and dicing into my flesh.