Last of the Amazons (11 page)

14

A DUEL OF HONOR

A
champion of tal Kyrte may not be armed by one of her own trikona, but another at one remove, assisted by the warrior's mother-mother. The lot, as fate would have it, fell to me, as trikona-mate to Eleuthera, who stood the same to Antiope. It was my role, not only to dress our war queen in corselet and armor, but to select and whet the warheads of her arrows, repaint the blood gutters in ritual jet and ochre, and to razor-fletch the flight feathers. She took four only, one for each cardinal point, with three bronze-sheathed javelins, and a single
pelekus,
the double axe. None other may attend, save a priestess of Artemis Ephesia to prompt the verses of the ceremony. I must bathe Antiope, apart in the Willow House, which sat astride the thermal springs of the Borysthenes marsh, and donate from my own trove that mirror of bronze by whose reflection our queen would know her soul in the life after, and which, if she were slain, would be buried yoked to her right wrist. In that event I must bear her body from the field and deliver it to Eleuthera and Stratonike, the mates of her High Trikona, who would bear the corpse to Hippolyta, her mother-mother, for burial. This was the mightiest honor of my life. I would sooner have sliced my own throat than committed an error in the rite.

I had expected to find our lady solemn, and had prepared my aspect with gravity for this chore. But she was gay, and joked away the time, not from restiveness but excess of spirit. Her concern was entirely for a clean kill: that the Scythian be slain at the first blow and require no untidy butchery. My own fear was less of the prince Borges than his brother Arsaces, henchman of the chariot; I urged our queen to remark him with vigilance. I had seen him shoot. To my further surprise, she interrogated me, quite gaily, on the progress of my “affair” with the youth Damon. “Have you kissed him, child? Have you tousled his curls?” When I blushed, she teased me more.

When we were done and she was fully armed, she made me go over her again, twice. “I must be beautiful today,” she said.

The harpers have retold the treachery offered by the prince of the Iron Mountain Scyths. That Borges commanded his brother to trade places with him, identities concealed beneath their armor. So that Arsaces, the younger and far superior archer, served not as henchman to drive the team, but as champion, where his skill could work against Antiope, exposed upon her mount, while Borges, shamming as his brother, handled the horses. It was Theseus who smelled out this device, sending an agent to bribe an informer among the Scythian guard. Or, as I have heard as well, a dream may have apprised him. Whichever, he appeared in person, at dawn, seeking entry to Antiope.

She was in the smoke bath, with Hippolyta and the priestess of Artemis, completing her purification. Two of the Queen's Companions intercepted him. Theseus was not permitted entrance but must speak from outside that screen erected for such intercourse, called the Willow Wall. He had acquired enough of our tongue to make a stab, but not enough to get it right. “Borges will fight you upside down” was how the message came. So I had to go out and speak to him directly.

Such an urgency of care informed his voice as confirmed my blackest fears. Not of the treachery of the Scythian, for this could be faced, but the concern of Theseus, stricken with love for our queen. Two of his knights, Lykos and Peteos, accompanied him. They saw it too.

When could it have fallen, this bolt of Eros? Theseus had never spoken to Antiope alone. No messages had been exchanged, and nothing passed between them beyond a look. Yet he loved her; nothing could be plainer.

I was stern with him, and, pledging that his warning would be faithfully conveyed, banished him from the precinct. How reluctantly he withdrew!

Returning through the Willow Wall I discovered her, my lady, watching Theseus through the withes. She had read the trepidation on his face and heard the anxiety in his voice. I have never seen such joy as lit her in that hour. Of speech she made none, apart from this: that I leave her bow and lances back, arming her with the horseback javelin, the discus, and the axe.

Here is how the fight went. Above the Lane of the Champions, upon the earthworks which face the sea and are called the Paeon Gate, the clans took their places in order. Borges and his brother fought from the iron chariot; Antiope from horseback, atop the chestnut gelding she called Sneak Biscuits. Theseus and his men looked on, as did the Iron Mountain clans, eleven hundred in all, with the other tribes of the East and the nations of tal Kyrte, sixty or seventy thousand in all.

The antagonists rushed at each other down the avenue bounded on each face by the earthworks. This is called in our tongue
ana kessa,
“up-and-back.” The skill is not so much in the initial pass, with the discharge of missiles at full gallop, as in the double back or reversion, when the antagonists come about and for a moment present their vulnerable flanks and heels. Two cypress posts stand here thirty yards apart, in a space called the Runway. Beyond the poles neither foe may strike, but both must withdraw to commence a second pass. Within this gantlet, however, anything goes. The gallant champion disdains the pole and slugs it out here.

Three times Antiope made her pass and each time took the pole, much to the displeasure of her partisans. With each rush she endured the shafts shot by her rival from behind his iron wall. This vulnerability Antiope had set for herself, fighting from horseback without armor save the crescent shield on her left forearm, designing to make up for this in agility between the posts, cutting back to the chariot's vulnerable rear and striking from there. But the henchman, the masked Borges, was no novice and employed the slopes of the earthworks to make his wheel-about, churning up great storms of dust and sand, with Antiope at the gallop hard behind, yet unable to get directly astern, so to say, as the car continued to double with terrific dexterity, descending the bank, wheeling across the lane, and mounting the opposite as it made its escape. All the while the masked Arsaces loosed his bolts rearward with fabulous speed and accuracy, while Antiope picked out the shafts in midflight and batted them aside with the flat of her shield.

Three times more the antagonists thundered down the chute. Now at each pass Antiope slung one of her trio of iron-freighted javelins, rising upon her sole planted on her horse's belly-band and slinging at the gallop, the missile's moment augmented by the sleeve extender. The bolts slammed into the iron facing of the car with such violent concussions as made the multitude cry in wonder. Each time the plate buckled and caved, yet no cast pierced the bunker entire. The chariot master loosed his bolts through embrasures on both sides and rear, standing shoulder to shoulder with his brother, who held the team, and so swiftly did one shaft follow another that it seemed not one man fired but three. Such was the prowess of the youth Arsaces, feigning to be his elder, that the thousands watching from the slopes cried out and even gasped as each bolt screamed toward his rival. Yet Antiope each time fended the hurtling death.

Six passes had been made, which Antiope had deliberately protracted that the onlookers might begin to suspect, by the skill with which he handled the bow, that beneath his armor the champion was Arsaces, the younger brother, and the henchman Borges, his elder. Now on the seventh rush the queen wheeled her mount so swiftly onto the rear of the slewing chariot that she drew hard alongside, into that shadow of vulnerability created by the relative stations of driver and champion, and from this vantage loosed point-blank the iron discus. The twelve-pound missile, slung at the rising gallop with all the champion's weight and strength behind it, struck the bowman upon that amber device of a griffin which he bore at his helmet's prow and, staving at once both helm and skull, dashed the latter and tore off the former. Arsaces' bow dropped; the prince pitched sidelong from the car. The helmet bounded end over end in the dust, describing an arc which terminated, at last, adjacent the corpse of its owner, which, unmasked, revealed itself to be not Prince Borges, but his younger brother Arsaces.

I looked to Theseus in this moment, then to Eleuthera, who had sensed as well the Athenian's passion for our queen. His aspect altered only an instant. Yet in that moment, as Antiope's foe rolled vanquished in the dust, I read upon Eleuthera's face such foredoom as compassed not just herself and Antiope but our nation entire. For as our queen here won Theseus' heart and gave hers to him, by this act she severed herself from the people, whose right arm was Eleuthera, which means freedom.

Now Borges' chariot fled. So swiftly did Antiope overtake it that her horse's forehooves actually mounted to the platform of the car, as she swiped with the axe, first at one flank, then the other, while Borges, slacking the reins and cringing to the floor planks, diced and dodged. When Antiope's mount spilled from its perch, the prince recaptured his team and resumed his flight, now out of the lane entire.

The yet-masked Borges fled down the earthway to the corrals where the horses for trade were penned. Into these excavations he lashed his team, with Antiope on his heels at the gallop, so that the onlookers in their myriads had to vacate their stations and scramble up and over the earthworks so as not to lose sight of the spectacle. Now could Antiope have pursued Borges into the pen and cut him down. Yet such an uproar of levity saluted the Scythian's comeuppance that she reined in, a javelin cast shy of where Borges found himself impounded among the milling herds, while from a score of ramparts the scorn of the nations pelted upon him.

Antiope tore her helmet back, revealing her flushed and triumphant face. With her axe she gestured to the Runway, where the corpse of Arsaces lay sprawled in the dirt.

“The challenger Borges has been slain. This fulfills the law. Therefore let his brother Arsaces live!”

Thus Borges the swindler fled with his servitors, never putting off his helmet to reveal his fraud. By the measure of his disgrace did Antiope's renown enlarge.

Men have asked what it was that Theseus loved in her. I answer with this story.

There is a tree in my country called the Weather Ash, which stands yet, by the river Hybristes, of such antiquity as to bear the lightning strikes not of Zeus but of Cronos, his father, and this tree has a legend. For two boughs grow from her, curved like the horns of a ram. Who could string these and draw them as a bow would rule all “beneath the Bear” and claim whichever bride he chose.

Many came. Bellerophon and Jason, and Heracles himself, but none could budge the horns. Now, in the aftercourse of this challenge of the Runway, Antiope took Theseus there and bade him make trial. Two thousand rode and witnessed. He strung the bow but could not draw it, though he offered prayers to Apollo and the Muses and promised each a temple if they would grant him victory.

Now Antiope stepped forward and in the name of love restrung the Horns.

“Try again.”

Theseus feared to, lest he fail. But she set his palm against the bole where the horns conjoined and begged him, as he loved her, to draw. And with as little effort as a child bends a reed in play, so he worked the Horns in their draw, and so distant flew the bolt.

Antiope laughed. “Now you have won your bride.”

For fairness of form and feature our lady was peerless among women, who could ride and run and knew no fear of beast or man, and none of Theseus himself. For other women desired boons of him, if only his seed or his name, or to claim place as his consort. Antiope wanted nothing. Only the man himself, to ride at her side and take his pleasure of her and she of him. At Athens in later seasons he brought her jewelry of ivory and gold; she laughed at it. Nor could her head be turned by fine linen or precious stones or houses or even horses, which she loved beyond all. She wanted only him, and this with all her heart. And what may a man resist less than to be loved for nothing but the fall of his curls and the sound of his voice? Thus Theseus, who had known women before as prizes or competitors, now fell into this wild creature as into a bottomless well, his delight in her society overmastering all other pursuits, so that he forgot his ships and realm and even to eat or sleep.

But our tale runs ahead. Let us return to the flight of Borges and his eleven hundred.

There is a rite of the Gathering, a night sacrifice to Ares called the Hecatomb, which comes after the Games of the Moon and inaugurates the final nine days of the season, during which the tribes reconstitute themselves and the novices, horse trials behind them, are enrolled in the clans and the orders.

The occasion of this ceremony chanced to fall four nights after the duel of Borges, while the camp yet rang with Antiope's triumph. In these rites the tribes, and all guest nations, are invited to select one of their number to offer an address in praise of that people's ancestors. This is an occasion of gaiety and fellow-feeling, with each tribe licensed to hoot in derision at the self-congratulation of its neighbors, with none taking offense but all delighting in the give and get.