Last of the Amazons (12 page)

A number spoke this night, the Maeotians and Cappadocians, Taurians and Massa Getai. Someone called the Athenians. Theseus stood and started toward the stand.

Three of tal Kyrte intercepted him. These were Eleuthera, Stratonike, and Skyleia. Eleuthera accused Theseus of bringing evil to the free people. Blood has been shed, she said; we have made enemies on account of this man.

“To what purpose has this outlaw been given leave to speak?” Eleuthera addressed Hippolyta, Antiope, and the Council of Elders. “Every other nation attends the Gathering at tal Kyrte's invitation; these Greeks alone have descended out of the sky. Are they pirates? Why have they crossed oceans, except to rob us? A prince and ally has been slain in their cause; war may follow. Beneath our shield they cower, these foreign mice, while our valor preserves them. Yet now they have found their tongue and presume to make speeches on the superiority of their ways!”

An uproar ascended, seconding the speaker. I glanced to Antiope. Her gaze held fastened upon Theseus, revealing nothing.

Theseus begged leave to reply. I recall his words because I was summoned to interpret.

He did not rebut Eleuthera. Rather he directed his defense to the queens and the elders. He acknowledged the straits in which he and his companions had stood on their advent to our homeland. Absent tal Kyrte's clemency, all would have perished. He thanked the free people for making his men welcome, and Antiope for so valiantly defending their honor. He had heard much of our nation, he declared, but nothing had prepared him for its greatness and magnanimity. He proclaimed himself, and no few of his men, smitten with our young women, not alone as comely females, but as exemplars of the warrior ethic and champions of a proud and noble race.

Acclamation saluted these sentiments; the people began to warm to the orator. Nor did his good looks work to his disadvantage. You who have known the man only in his middle years may not account his beauty as a young king of twenty-nine or thirty. As he stood before the tribes of tal Kyrte, few could look upon his grace and manliness and not find themselves favorably disposed.

Eleuthera cut this off. “Sisters, here is the seducer! He sets honeyed words before us as a vendor plies cakes in a bazaar. In just this way is
netome,
evil luck, brought to the people.”

More clamor erupted. Theseus clearly sensed the gravity of the charge; he requested that the term be translated, that he might know what he was accused of.

Tal Kyrte, I informed him, has an evil god, Netosa, who is the lamprey, the succubus. This creature works his mischief at night, to overturn the order of the world. Anything which makes its apparition uninvited is mistrusted as alien and possessed of malign intent.

“I will not sit to hear this man extol his ancestors,” Eleuthera declaimed, “and I call upon you, sisters, to drive him by your outrage from the stand.”

More cries reinforced her. Theseus held till the tumult had abated.

“If it displease you, Captain,” he spoke, addressing Eleuthera, “I shall not speak of ancestors. However, with your exemption, I propose an alternative. I will praise my nation's issue. Will you permit this? Will you let me speak, not to Athens's past but to her future?”

Laughter greeted this. The people approved the novelty and responded with enthusiasm. Eleuthera reluctantly acceded.

“My city is young,” Theseus began. “In might and fame she stands in the shadow of such courts as Corinth and Mycenae, Elis and Thebes, not to say your own nation. Yet of all these, I propose, she is the only one whose political virtue will enlarge with the passage of the years.”

Again Eleuthera sought to interdict. This time, however, the people had been caught by the speaker's theme. “Let the man say his piece!” they cried and compelled her to give back. Theseus thanked his hearers and resumed.

“Once, my friends of tal Kyrte, all of humankind lived as the nations of the plains do now, keepers of stock, great warriors and raiders, as yourselves. Clans owned no more than they could carry, but lived by their wits and skill at arms. Death skulked about them in the dark. At night the tribesman lay down with weapons to hand; even in sleep he held vigilant, fearful of attack by beasts or men.

“Then came the city. Her walls of stone held out the enemy; behind her ramparts man might live free of fear. He learned to cultivate the land. The gods taught him domestication of grains and fermentation of the grape; he had bread now, and wine. The potter's craft and the smith's provided him with tools and weapons; the mariner's art extended his reach across seas. He learned to trade. With time, wealth accumulated. He need not merely subsist, but live. For the first time humankind possessed leisure for the gentler pursuits of music, poetry, and the arts. Agriculture banished famine, for the husbandman might lay up from one year's plenty reserve for the next.

“In the city man enjoyed protection of law. He might walk abroad unarmed. In his prior, tribal life, all property had been held in common. Now in the city, he might call things his own—land, home, implements with which to procure his livelihood. By hard work one could make a better life. What energy and innovation this released! Community multiplied the individual's reach and moment, for the knowledge acquired by one might be set at the service of all. Now, each individual need not contain within himself the sum of all experience, but concentrate, if he will, upon a single art, as goldsmithing or physic, viniculture or sailbending. The singer may sing, the weaver weave. Each prospers in happiness and imparts prosperity to all.

“An individual need no longer be a warrior, whose every hour is spent in war or readiness for war, but each has leisure to think and talk and pray, to participate in politics, travel to the wonders of other lands, erect temples to the gods, and lay out a beautiful city, where the wealth of the world's goods and wisdom is available to all to enrich his soul. In the city, man's years are extended by the medicaments of the physician's art. He need not expire untimely, beneath the blows of the elements or wild beasts, but live out in health the measure of his days.”

At this point Eleuthera could contain herself no longer. “Ha!” she cried and, calling upon the assembled tribes, sought their permission to rebut, in her phrase, these lies and calumnies. The multitude roared its approval.

Eleuthera mounted to the stand of cypress hewn into the stone outwork. And it must be told that she matched her rival both in physical stature and presence of person; of such surpassing comeliness was she that the antagonists, standing little more than a spear length apart, seemed struck as two sparks from the same ember, peers and equals in every way.

“Our visitor,” Eleuthera began, “declares the way of the city superior to our life of the steppe because it produces, he claims, a nobler being. Hearing this, it was all I could do to keep from hooting aloud, which I would have, were I the rude savage he styles us to be.”

She hailed the life of the plains. The openness of spirit, the equality of station, the rigorousness of person its demands instill in the hearts of all. “I have seen men of the city, with their paunches and spindly hams. They could not last an hour beneath God's sky. Agriculture! I would sooner carve furrows in the flesh of my mother than rend the earth with the hideous beak of the plough. For what? To prize a mealy legume from the dirt and call it dinner? God made humankind to hunt, as the lion and the eagle, not graze upon straw like cattle and sheep. The chase inculcates vigor and fortitude. It leaves Mother Earth as God intended, unriven and undefiled.”

Acclamation resounded. The tribes of tal Kyrte, seconded by the male Scyths and Cimmerians, Black Cloaks and Tower Builders, clashed their spearshafts against the bowls of their shields and roared to heaven. I glanced to Antiope, whose eyes still held fastened upon Theseus, himself enduring with patience this rebuke of Eleuthera.

“Our Athenian guest,” the champion resumed when the tumult had subsided, “claims that cities produce leisure. What rubbish! Who has more free time than the hunter and warrior, whose very work is sport? We of the steppe do not know the word labor, for all we do is engaged in with joy, reverencing the ordinance of our Maker. Our days are passed in God's play; at night we lie down with the healthy fatigue of activities well shaping to body and soul. Property! What is its produce save misery and estrangement from one's kind? In the city discontented man toils beneath the lamp, lest his neighbor get the jump of him. The blacksmith becomes slave to his bellows, the musician to his lyre. Each reviles his fellow as rival and foe. City man returns from his day jaded and debilitated and rises to the next dreading his own self-indenture. Tal Kyrte turns to the east with joy, saluting the dawn in wonder and anticipation. For us the day is that to which we surrender, not like the city man, who seeks to shape it to his will. Blasphemy and arrogance! Walk his streets, sisters and guests. Inspect his grotesque spawn. Whores infest his doorways, rogues and mountebanks pack his courts, cutpurses and pickpockets his marketplace. And don't preach to me of law! What need have we of it? Education? We require neither proctors nor pedagogues to tutor youth in our ways but each maiden bursts her heart to master them, unbidden. We could not stop them if we tried! And as for the arts, which our guest cites as proof of city man's ascension to nobility, I ask: Why attend an imitation of the nightingale when you can hear the real thing? Why render sky in art when you have but to look up to behold heaven itself? This sermonizer Theseus has praised physicians and their arts of tendance upon the sick. Ha! We know no illness on the steppe. With the city comes unnatural extension of days. When it's time to die, die!”

Yet mightier ovation saluted this. And Eleuthera, borne aloft as an eagle, elevated her impeachment to a yet more truculent pitch.

“Our guest in his oration praises the city for its gentility and restraint. Between the lines he calls us savages. Are we, sisters? Consider our pass:

“We are women unmastered by men, yet hemmed on all quarters by those who would inflict this wretched state upon us. Do you wonder at our ferocity? Other nations fight to preserve their native soil; only we must defend our flesh and souls, which men would enslave if they could, as they have in every other quadrant. Your own wives and mothers, Athenians, once held the franchise, I have heard. They could vote and owned an equal voice in affairs of state. You stole this from them—your king Cecrops did—immuring them in servitude and silence. Never will tal Kyrte endure this! We are bound by our resistance to those who would make chattel of us. We as no other people stand isolated and apart, with none to count as allies save our own spirit and resolve. Do we defend ourselves like wild beasts? You would too! Do we spurn quarter? You would too! Enemies envelop us and more come, as yourselves, across oceans to steal our freedom.”

She faced Theseus directly now. “And if you think to thieve it from us, thou pirate, remember this: in other societies, willingness to die for the nation is a virtue which must be inculcated. Not in ours. Among the free people allegiance unto death arises as immanently as in a pack of wolves and endures, as impossible to eradicate. I will embrace my own slaughter this moment, and so will every woman and girl here, to preserve our freedom. And if the free people must fall, then nothing of us shall remain, for we will bathe the earth in our blood and yours before surrendering this liberty we love so that we call ourselves by its name, tal Kyrte: the Free.”

Further uproar ensued, with thousands acclaiming Eleuthera's fervency, while others cried out that such excess was exorbitant, no proper way to address a guest. And Eleuthera herself, perceiving that her rancor had waxed immoderate, stepped aside and abated her harangue.

Antiope stepped in. She proposed to Theseus that the Athenian resume his panegyric and carry it to its close, at which point Eleuthera might respond. All approved.

“I commend our most excellent friend,” Theseus resumed, with a bow to Eleuthera, “and her heartfelt encomium of the life of the steppe. I make no brief in opposition. But she has closed her discourse upon the subject of death. Let us pick up there, and carry on.

“Beyond all which divides nation from nation, one lot unites us: our mortality. Death's mill makes grist of us all. This before all elevates humankind above the beasts: we alone foreken our mortality. We alone know we must die.

“The nature of our species is savage. The imperative of predation resides as deeply in our bones as in the wolf and the lion. Yet the foreknowledge of our extinction not only dissevers us from these brutes, but imposes upon us an obligation. For beyond God's statute of slaughter rises another, mightier decree.

“Humankind is commanded to ascend from savagery. This is God's mandate, which cries out from the epicenter of our being: the imperative to mount from the base to the noble, from the savage to the civil, from beast to human.

“In earlier eras men knew no law. He slew those even of his own family, and when he vanquished his enemies, the savagery of his vengeance exceeded even that of wild beasts. How brutal and appalling have been his acts of atrocity!

“But let me not try your patience, friends. Only hear and consider. There exists a universal law, before which even the gods must bow: the higher supersedes the lower. As the Titans and the Sons of Earth have been overthrown by Zeus and the Olympians, so must the race of men and women continue to progress, toward humanity and apart from bestiality, toward reason and apart from passion, toward love and away from fear.”

Theseus concluded by praising the clemency of Hippolyta and Antiope, yes, and even Eleuthera, and of the nation of tal Kyrte entire. In granting sanctuary to him and his men they had acted as Zeus Who Protects the Stranger would have them act and thus sided with the higher impulses of humanity, not the baser reflexes of beasts. He thanked them and stepped down.

Now the people called for Eleuthera to respond. But she had observed the closeness with which Antiope had attended Theseus throughout the debate. She saw her mate moved by the foreigner's eloquence and bending to his case. For this reason and others she declined to respond, declaring herself no orator, but called instead upon Antiope, as war queen, and bade her pronounce the rebuttal in the people's name. For Eleuthera hoped, by setting her lover as antagonist to the Athenian, to crush in the shoot any affinity budding between them, or, if Antiope would not take him on, then compel her to demonstrate this before the people. I stood immediately to Antiope's left and could see her face throughout this summons. Though she perceived her friend's motive, yet the acclamation of the tribes could not let her slip this call. She came forward and began: