Last of the Amazons (27 page)

Now came the final push. The artillery atop the Acropolis ceased firing. Across no-man's-land our swarm surged. Our object was a front of wall between two turrets, perhaps a hundred feet across, atop which hung our countrymen, lowering ropes and ladders. As the foreranks reached this face and began to scale it, the center compressed against them, driven by the terror of the foe at the rear, who cursed their countrymen for mounting so tardily. The mob bunched up like bees. In its midst an undigested clot of Scyths went after us with shortswords and bare hands. From all sides pressed Amazon cavalry. As our fellows mounted rung to rung and hand over hand, the foe fired into their exposed backs or, upon those who had draped their shields turtle-style, into their legs and arms. Bodies plummeted from the face; blood and piss sheeted down the stone. I found myself at the foot of a ladder and confess I kept sending others up before me. If I could have burrowed into the rock, I'd have done it and traded places eagerly with a worm. The ground at our feet was strewn with splinters of the boulders already dropped from above. When you lost footing, which you did again and again in that mob, shards ripped your knees and palms. Thighs and arms grew lacquered with blood, to which the stone dust adhered, bleaching all to an unearthly pallor. The sight was ghastly beyond recounting, as it seemed not men but shades dueled, and not aboveground but in some sun-forsaken netherworld.

Eleuthera led the rush upon us. At her side pressed Stratonike and Skyleia, Alcippe and Glauke Grey Eyes; Evandre and Pantariste; Enyo and Deino and Adrasteia. Theseus massed the stoutest of our corps but the Amazon horse punched through. Their weapon in close quarters is not bow but axe, which they wielded overhand, staving shields and helmets, hacking men through at the neck and cleaving arms at the shoulder. They hauled our ladders down with grapnels and buried their blades in the backs of men mounting the walls. I was flush against the face when a wedge of the foe lanced across, driving us out into the open. More Amazon horse poured in behind. We were cut off. Enemy volleys swept the ramparts above. This was the finish. In moments, all would be lost. Then from the melee arose such a cry as surely none save gods and titans had heard heretofore.

This was Theseus, bellowing to the gunners overhead. His call ascended not in words but in some idiom primordial. “Upon us!” his cry commanded. Meaning, Loose your stones on us and the foe together!

My father's kinsman Talos served among the chute gangs on the summit that day. He told, later, of the despair atop the Acropolis as the artillerymen released their fusillades upon the commingled masses of Athenians, Amazons, and Scyths. With terrible prayers our gunners winched up their drop ramps, while along the brink of the Rock, wives and comrades peered down in horror, beholding their countrymen obliterated alongside the foe. Where I hunkered, flush against the face, was a pocket of safety. Yet such sounds and sights assaulted as none may bear and stay the man he was. Boulders plummeted weighing fifty and a hundred pounds, in salvos across two hundred feet of face. Where this tonnage struck, the concussion was titanic. Fragments as big as a man's head blew in every direction. I saw Diognetus the weaver sheared off at breast height. One moment he was a man, the next a tower of sundered guts. Stones plummeted in such quantities as to annihilate a square ten yards by ten. Yet pairs of men still contended. Nor did one cry for cessation, so desperate had become the struggle, but each, convinced of his own end, fought only to take his enemy with him to hell.

Atop the Rock the woe of the artillerymen was amplified by their awareness of that pollution, monstrous and ineradicable, which they brought upon themselves by this slaughter of their countrymen. Men understood, Talos recounted, that this iniquity would haunt them to the end of their days. Numbers defied the order, deeming no fate worth an action so abominable, while others denounced these as traitors. All sacrifice must be borne, however horrible! Your king commands you, at toll of his own life! Men lamented the bitterness of their fate and cried out to the gods to witness their reluctance to perform it. None owned the stomach to look down, my father's kinsman said, but, weeping, loaded truck upon truck and levered these into the chutes and over. Talos himself did peer from the brink and rued this felony all his days. To see your tons of stone plummet, he declared, while gauging with the eyes, as one cannot help but do, upon which province the mass will fall; then the impact itself, the shrieking slivers and detonating dust . . .

Gunners dumped chute upon chute. What else could they do? Their king had commanded, and commanded still. In anguish the men redoubled their salvos, as if by this intensification they could bring the slaughter to a swifter close. Bystanders uncompelled, and even women, seized stones and slung them, amid the most baleful imprecations, upon the foe and on their own.

The enemy fell back. Our men waded to the walls. Their comrades lowered ropes and poles and even bedding straps. I saw Theseus beneath the eastern turret, defending a patch so that others might climb, before he himself took the tether and was hauled clear. For myself, I mounted the face with my bare hands, securing purchase on such nicks as would not support a lizard, so compelling is the impetus of terror and so mighty the imperative of self-preservation.

28

A TRIAL OF
AEDOR

Damon continues:

W
here the marketplace had stood, on the flat beneath the Hill of the Nymphs, was the only level ground that had not been appropriated for camps (the Amazons and Copper River Scyths had rigged it out as a racetrack). Here at the second dawn succeeding the fight, Theseus met Eleuthera in a duel of honor.

No formal stakes were established, that is, there was no deal that if Theseus won, the Amazons would pack up and go home, nor, should Eleuthera prevail, would the city tuck tail and quit. Nonetheless the freight of the outcome was monumental. The duel would be viewed by both sides as a trial, not only of their champions but of their gods. Who owned the magic? Who had the power? Indeed among the tribes of the East no event, down to the declination of piss in the wind, is accounted innocent of supernatural import. This is why they love to gamble. In the savage's eyes such sport is no vice (the conception would be absurd to him) but a finding of each man's soul power, or
aedor,
as he calls it. A tribesman will bet on anything, from the whorling of leaves in a doorway to the agony of a captive under torture. Let him call the wager right; he is flushed with esteem. Wrong, he plunges to despair.

The savage does not see the world as a man of reason might, that is, an entity discrete from heaven, governed by laws of cause and effect. The clansman cannot conceive such notion. In his view, this earth is but an adumbration of the Otherworld, whose surface he sounds for the apparition of the Almighty. Existence is a gaming board to him; he casts the bones and awaits their revelation. The savage knows sorrow; in his tongue birds do not sing but “cry”; babes weep not but “mourn.” The tribesman is a slave to superstition. For all his valor he will cower at the advent of a hare and break off mighty campaigns before mischance in a flight of sparrows. The Amazons are little better and, truth be told, our own countrymen advanced by barely a midge. It was lost on few within Theseus' command, and certainly none within Eleuthera's, that the morrow's bout would be read by both sides as nothing less than the judgment of God. Whose champion triumphed would be seen as insuperable; whose fell as doomed. Thus in each camp no measure was omitted, however preposterous or barbaric, to secure the favor of heaven for the coming affray.

My brother and I, it chanced, were among those detailed to retrieve the dead from the previous day's battle. The Amazons and Scyths had already claimed theirs. When we passed out the Nine Gates that evening we could see them, in their camps on the hills across from the Rock, laying out the coal trenches over which they would spit our captive countrymen and erecting the gibbets upon whose cross-ties these poor wretches would be flayed. This is how the savage entreats heaven's favor.

The tribesman wagers on how his victim will endure. One who has not witnessed such an orgy cannot conceive the ecstasies to which such a brute may ascend, applying iron and flame to the flesh of his foe. Nor are these acts cruelty in the savage's eyes, as they would be, performed by a man of civilized station, but rather a trial of the captive's
aedor,
his magic. The prisoner too participates. By an equation incomprehensible to the emancipated sensibility, the clansman acclaims his victim even as he impales and vivisects him. For the captor's object is the acquisition of the
aedor
of his prisoner; the victim's, to prove his magic superior to his torturer's. The more nobly he endures, the greater his power. He suffers, does the captive, not for himself (for the savage cannot conceive of himself apart from his gods and tribe) but for the grantors of his luck, those Otherworld guardians who have endowed him with his soul magic. He seeks to prove his power mightier than his foes' and, expiring, wring the last drop of renown. I have seen victims spit their terminal breath in their tormentors' faces and dive to hell with a laugh.

The Scyths had tortured Athenians in the early stages of the siege but found it so unsatisfactory that the practice was discontinued. To the savage our woeful performance was proof of Athenian gutlessness. Their contempt for us redoubled. They came to deem even the happiest outcome of the war, victory and plunder, as beneath their dignity. They even gave up taking our scalps. Our hair had no
aedor
. No respectable warrior would hang it from his belt.

This night however, my brother and I saw, the art of torture had been resurrected. Atop the Hills of Ares and the Pnyx, the first fortune-forsaken were being trundled to their ordeal. Soon their cries would ascend in choruses hideous and appalling, to mingle with timbrel and tom-tom and the orgiastic ululations of the foe.

We could hear the Scyths and Amazons scarifying themselves now. They perform this rite in pairs as they dance. An instrument like a carpenter's chisel pares strips of flesh from legs and backs and bellies. By such ceremony, the savages build up power for the duel of champions to come. Elias and I could see their stewards beneath Market Hill, preparing the runway where the champions would meet. On Ares' Hill the Amazons were sacrificing horses in the night rite they call
Nikteria.
Bonfires blazed along the summit. Below, on the field of the slain, we used the light to work by.

The savage strips every rag from the foe he has vanquished. He takes ears and noses, looping these onto strings, which he wraps about his midriff. The foe no longer took scalps, as I said, or heads; rather he hacked off limbs or cleaved the skull clean through, to rob the soul of its magic in the life after. Can there stand a chore more dolorous than this: to collect the corpses of one's countrymen, hewn in two, naked and mutilated, impossible to identify? We heaped the dead atop blankets, two and three to a pile, and dragged these to the base of the Three Hundred Steps. No mules remained to haul them topside; all had been butchered for meat. From here each corpse must be shouldered, intact or otherwise, and humped to the summit.

That night Theseus made no speeches. “If I fall, return the lady Antiope to her people.” This was all he said.

Antiope was there that night when our retrieval detail quit. She had come out at last from her cloister. I passed close by her on the battlement; she did not see me, nor did I seek her attention. Her gaze stood fixed upon the pageant of horror being enacted on the hills across.

My duties took me away for the watch. When I returned, past midnight, Antiope had not budged.

The lady stood alone at the embrasure south of the summit gate, compassed only by the pages and guardsmen Theseus had assigned to protect her. I had forgotten what a specimen she was. She wore Phrygian boots with trousers bloused and an Amazon riding wale about her waist. A quilted
spolas
jerkin bound her torso. Over her left shoulder was draped the panther skin she had worn defeating Borges at the Mound City. Her right breast was bare, revealing the starfish scar called
tessyxtos,
produced by the searing of the breast in childhood, and the chevron slashes of the
matrikon,
the ritual self-mutilation Amazons perform on the eve of battle.

The foe's orgy went on all night. Antiope never left her station. Would she join the battle? On whose side? Theseus had forbidden her to arm, as I have told, and set death as the penalty for him who aided her. Would he rescind this? Would it take his own death to annul it?

Two hours before dawn the king withdrew to the citadel. Antiope preceded him. She bathed and armed him, so we heard (for she debarred all entry, even to the King's Companions), and dressed his hair. Her own spear she set in his grip.

The fight took place on the grounds of the marketplace, beneath the foremost of Athens's last untaken portals, the Sacred Gate of the Enneapylon. The King's Companions defended this. Behind, the Three Hundred Steps had been spiked and crosswalled, should the foe offer perfidy. The last houses and treasuries had been fortified; upon and above these massed the final four thousand able to fight. It was dawn. Wounded lined the Fortress at the summit.

Eleuthera's seconds—Stratonike, Skyleia, and Glauke Grey Eyes—rode onto the flat from the north, in armor but not painted. Their hair had been dressed. They were helmetless. Three posts had been erected at the far end of the chute; each rider reined-in beside one. Stratonike came forward alone. At the south waited Theseus' seconds—Lykos, Peteos, and Amompharetus, chief of the Spartan spearmen. They too wore dress armor. The orders of combat were rehearsed by Saduces, prince of Trallian Thrace, speaking flawless Attic Greek. Killing may be done only within the ring, which admonition was moot, as neither rival would forfeit honor to preserve his or her life.

Theseus slewed forth in a chariot, the royal car of his father Aegeus, driven by his cousin Iophon. He wore black armor, a breastplate with a bull's head and matching shield, a twenty-pounder, bronze sheathing atop an oak chassis three thumbs'-breadths thick. His helmet was black with a crest of white kestrel feathers. He had shaved his beard and shorn his forelock to afford his rival no berth of purchase. His weapons were three javelins, in an ox-hide quiver on his car, two eight-foot spears, ash tipped with iron; and the thrusting sword in a baldric at his hip. The chariot drew up at the southern posts. Theseus did not dismount. His seconds crossed and spoke briefly with him.

Eleuthera entered from the north on Soup Bones. She made no show at all. No chariot. No conference with her seconds. She carried a small bronze target shield and one horseback javelin. A
pelekus
axe rode in a sheath between her shoulder blades. In a case at the small of her back nested an iron discus. She carried no bow and no sword.

“I am Theseus, son of Aegeus—”

“Enough! I know who you are!”

Horses on both sides stamped and snorted. You could see the chariot wheels rock, rollering a trace in the dust, and the leather-gauntleted forearms of the henchman restraining the team.

Eleuthera did not drive Soup Bones forward, only let him surge, reining after ten paces, yet a hundred apart from her rival. Her right hand rose to the cheekpiece of her helmet. “Kill me if you can!” she called. With a snap of her neck, she dropped the iron plate before her eyes.

A cheer shot from the throats of sixty thousand as chariot and horse churned from the standing start and gathered way, hurtling toward one another. Theseus elevated his shield, lapping its convex bowl over the prow of the car, and seated his shoulder within the hollow of its rim. His right arm held the first javelin, a five-footer; he set his left foot foremost upon the platform, right planted at the rear to push off into the cast. Eleuthera came at him with the horseback javelin. In instants the antagonists were upon one another; Theseus threw, Eleuthera held. The king's lance would have taken her full in the chest had she not plunged to her horse's flank, hanging on by her heel only and a loop through the mane. In a heartbeat she was astride again. Theseus' javelin had been hurled with such force as to pass on, clear of the arena, and fix among the spectators of the Thyssa Getai, striking a luckless fellow in the foot. He yowled. A great cheer arose. Chariot and horse slewed at the terminal of the runway and wheeled to return.

The second pass, Eleuthera made on the left of the car, veering at the last instant in front of the team. Again she did not throw; again Theseus' cast slung wide, as his rival spurred unexpectedly so that his second lance deflected off her target shield, sailing across the arena to fix into a stake at the far rail. As the chariot spun for the third track, one could see the king strip helmet and shield, so as not to impede his throw, wedging both into their nests on the car. He knew he had been bested twice and must hit home with this cast or fight on foot against a mounted foe.

Again the rivals dug toward one another; again Eleuthera held fire; again Theseus' shot screamed wide. As his car slewed again about the turning posts, the king sprang to the sand; henchman and team withdrew; Theseus advanced on foot, helmet re-seated, with shield and spear. Eleuthera wheeled at the far end of the chute, reining Soup Bones, who was already lathered beneath his armor, slinging spume from his bridle; his jaw worked furiously at the bit. From beneath Eleuthera's faceplate spit shot in a plume, pink with blood from her tongue, bitten through in the excitement. The Amazon took the reins in her teeth. From its sheath at the small of her back she extracted the eight-pound discus, seating it in her left fist, counterweight to the horseback javelin in its sleeve extender in her right.

Cries for blood ascended from every quarter. Among the clansmen watching from elevation, wild fellows could be seen pounding each other's shoulders and backs. Faces crimson, they bellowed in their savage tongues, making the veins of their necks stand out, while clashing spear shafts against shield bowls in a thunderous cacophony. The Amazons loosed such yip-yipping as made the stadium keen like a pine copse in a gale.

On foot Theseus dashed forward to the center of the ring, seeking to shorten his rival's run-up. He worked in fast shuffle steps, at a half crouch, the bowl of his shield before him at an angle, lower edge leading, with its ox-hide skirt skimming in the dust. He canted the shield sidewise as well, to deflect Eleuthera's shot when it came, with the nasal of his helmet set against the sweat stain on the leather of his shield's upper rim, leaving visible to the foe only the eye slits and the kestrel-plume crown. My eye found Selene among the champions; she trembled, it seemed, like a bowstring at the catch.