Last of the Amazons (14 page)

BOOK FIVE

THE WILD
LANDS

16

OUR SEA

Damon's voice resumes:

T
he third day ended; the fourth began. The Amazons trekked now, no longer mounted but at the foot trot to spare the horses, which were swapped, jaded for fresh, five times a day. The country had gone from level pan to rugged plateau, cut by great washes and ravines. You could see where these breaks had checked the foe's flight by the boulevards churned in the turf as he drove his herds, hunting a path to get round them. Now the track became stony. The Amazons wrapped their mounts' hooves in ox-hide and packed their kit on their own backs.

To have known women of Athens, my own mother and sisters cloistered within the fold, and then turn to these specimens of the steppe was to behold not different cultures but different species. Do you imagine you can trek with these daughters of the plains? Give it up, my friend. They will run you into the dirt. As for strength, I adduce this incident with the captain Alcippe, Powerful Mare, to whom I had been assigned one noon as liaison. In a stand of sycamore she discovered an infant wren toppled from its perch. Cocooning the fledgling in her right hand, she grasped the bough above with the left and hauled her entire weight one-handed, eye level to the nest. This, with ten pounds of axe and sheath on her back, as well as a fore-and-aft cuirass of leather and bronze. On a bet I called out Selene to a javelin cast. I could not come within thirty feet of her. As to the current trek afoot: I have never suffered as on those two days, and they who were my companions may testify now: Theseus himself must summon every reserve simply to keep up.

At the fourth noon the dust of Borges' rear guard was spotted, twenty miles ahead. At once a hundred took off in pursuit. Amazons run their prey down in relays, with fresh mounts trailed up under the care of their novices. I straggled far to the rear, with my brother and several others, arriving at dusk on our spent horses to find Selene's sister Chryssa and a party of six just scalping two Scyths whose mounts had played out beneath them. To the nations of the steppe the hairs of the head are receptors of divine
aedor,
soul; to take a scalp is to possess the foe's essence—and to prevent it from finding rest in the life to come. To our party Chryssa presented the grisly sheaves. We withdrew, appalled. The women eyed us with incredulity. These fellows, they clearly concluded, are madder than we thought.

We were picking up a feel for Amazon life. The males of the
kabar,
the smiths and mechanics, are granted by their mistresses all freedoms save two: they may not speak in counsel and may not ride. They are permitted mules and asses for their waggons but may not learn horsemanship. This is for warrioresses alone.

Like their horses, Amazons take no bread. Wine too they will not touch. Meat and mare's milk, from the teat when they are children, in the fermented form of
yourte
when they are grown, comprise their diet, with goat's milk and cheese, honey, berries, and the marrow of reeds. When depleted, they tap their herds' veins and gulp the blood, patching the incision as insouciantly as a tailor mends a tunic. They gnaw clay and chalk, and think nothing of devouring an antelope or aurochs, bones and all.

The depth of their intimacy with their horses may not be overstated. Each beast is known to each woman, across herds of a thousand, and each knows his station within the string and the band. Primary mounts lord it over lesser, while night horses hold themselves apart, haughty as barons.

Amazons of different ages take differently to the horses, the elders with matter-of-fact ease, warriors with proprietary dash, young girls deliriously in love. Not all the gold of Babylon may detach these maidens from their mounts, and this love is returned thrice over. On the trek the girls seem more like horses than people. Their language is sign and posture; they communicate by whistles and squeals, indistinguishable to Greek ears from the sounds made by the horses themselves. The concept of “breaking'' a horse is inconceivable in such an environment, as the animals seek the society of the girls out of love alone and may not be parted from them by fire or flood.

On the army trekked. The Wild Lands, one came to understand, were to our patronesses not featureless wastes but peopled across every league with gods and ghosts. Descending to a course unexceptional to civilized eyes, the brigade breaks into a hymn. I query Selene. There, she points to a depression, Mother Horse first struck the earth with her hoof, bringing forth water. Farther on, we mount a plateau pocked with chunks of black pumice. Here the bolts of Zeus drove the race of Cronos under. The corps puts up “Fall of the Titans”:

Now the hour of their passing.

Younger wait to take their place.

Even they weep who have them vanquished,

Never more to see their face.

On the trail Greeks and Amazons share scant intercourse; at night they pitch their camps apart. At that season the heat of the steppe is fierce, but plummets with darkness. Nights are frigid. The Amazons sleep with their kind, by pairs and trios, under the ground-hugging elk-hide shelters called “downwinders,” pillowed on the wolfskins and fleeces which make triple duty as saddle cloths and blankets.

Of all Greeks and Amazons, beyond myself and Selene, only two took pains to acquire knowledge of the other's tongue. These were Theseus and Antiope. I saw them converse directly no more than twice a day, governed by a self-imposed reserve, but each independently sought out those like Selene who had proficiency in both tongues. My brother and I were present in the Athenian camp, the third night, when Theseus and Prince Lykos got into a row on this account.

The company had settled about fires of bricks. Theseus was observing that the Amazon word for acorn is “nut small hand,” as the oak leaf to their eyes seems to have five fingers. Our king was charmed by this simplicity, remarking it direct and pure.

“Rubbish!” declared Lykos. He proclaimed the Amazon language the tongue of savages, “the speech beasts would make if they could.”

“Exactly!'' replied Theseus with animation. “The Amazons tread lightly with language, not to rob a thing of its spirit by the magic of giving it a name.”

Around the fire, looks were exchanged. “Indeed the woman is beautiful,” observed Philippus with a laugh.

“The charm of these bitches lies between their legs,” Lykos declared, “the same as with all women, and we are drawn to them for this and no more, the same as all men.”

Theseus regarded his countryman with patience. “I asked the maid Selene what her people meant when they said they ‘dream.' She indicated the steppe, which she called
aral nata,
‘Our Sea.' I could see she meant not plain and sky alone, though these comprised the physical expression of the term, but rather an inner plain and sky, save that to her, I believe, inner and outer were indivisible. ‘All that we do and speak arises from this sea. We listen to its voice. This is dreaming.' ”

“This is twaddle!” snorted Lykos.

Theseus: “Have you seen them stand beneath the sky, these women, the way horses do, motionless for hours? Is it not a marvel?”

“They are dumb as stumps,” declared Lykos, “and stand so.”

“Two will stand,” Theseus continued, “wordless and motionless, neither touching nor regarding the other, yet clearly yoked. Now a third approaches. She greets neither, simply assumes station, beside her sisters yet apart. The first two have taken no notice, it would seem, yet clearly they welcome the third. All simply stand, as they are.”

“They are daft!”

“They are ‘dreaming.' ”

“Mackerel may dream, my lord.”

“Yes, and leviathans. They swim in this sea, these braves, and wish to be plucked from it no more than a cetacean seeks to be beached upon dry land.”

“And what is this sea, Theseus, but the sea of ignorance? The ocean of barbarism and benightedness. They are a race of savages, however shapely their hips. It sits not well upon a king of Athens, my lord, to yield to such sentimentality. The language of Greece is mankind's glory! It has raised us from the slough, and its reflection, reason, has elevated us above the base and the bestial. What would you have us do, Theseus? Lie down in this sea of ‘dreaming' as a hog in a wallow? If you want to have your way with this wench, take her! Pack her home as your bride, for all I care. But spare us the humbug, if you please!”

All this was reported to Antiope, one may be sure. Little took place that she didn't know of. Did it cause her distress? I chanced to approach Selene that morning as she groomed her mount; I failed to notice Antiope, standing on the further side. From the queen's lips I heard, “Are we savages, Selene?”

Antiope saw me now. I flushed and stammered an apology. She did not curb her query.

“Are we savages, Greek, as your captain, Lykos, contends? Is Selene? Am I?”

That morning male riders joined the column from the north, Caucasians from the mountains on the track to the Gate of Storms. They brought reports that Borges' men had taken another herd and butchered the lasses defending it. The Scyths, the new arrivals told, had scalped a number, and taken the heads of most. They would make drinking cups of the skulls and pend them as trophies from their war belts.

All lightheartedness now fled the column. The pace redoubled. Warriors began to paint themselves and their horses. Now the names changed of every weapon and item of kit. They became war names. This was new to me. That battle-axe called a
pelekus
was now named
arapata,
“soul slayer”; horses became “eagles,” shields “walls.” Each item became personified. One observed Amazons addressing lances and ironheads aloud, as if these possessed reason and the capacity to respond. Each arrow had become a living thing; the warrioresses made compacts with them, beseeching their favor, and sacrificed strips of skin and lines scored in their own flesh.

An Amazon referred to herself now in the third person. Selene had become
Mela
, “Black,” and painted her face, breasts, and shoulders with a substance made from elk grease, chalk, and charcoal. If you addressed her as Selene, she did not hear, nor could you call her “Black” in the first person, but must put it in the third: “Will Black answer a question?” “Is Black hungry?” Speech, of which the Amazons had never been prodigal, was now cut near to nothing. The women conversed by signs, and these curt and warlike.

Among our Athenians, numbers began to ape the women, binding their curls in aboriginal fashion, even scarifying their flesh. It became necessary for Theseus to forbid such barbaric practice and, when several defied him, to make examples of them.

Late on the fourth day, the corps came upon paunch fires of horseflesh. The foe no longer hunted but butchered the beasts he drove. He knew fear and stepped up his pace. Amazon foreriders shot ahead, no longer in twos and threes but platoons, and not novices but grown warriors.

Elias and I rode ahead too, with Philippus and others under Prince Peteos. We pressed on till dark, alternately trotting afoot and riding. We had long since lost sight of the Amazon foreriders. Our mounts were worn to a nub; they must rest and be watered. We came upon a dry wash and scooped sand till the muddy wallow showed.

From the rear came a lass of the Amazons. She reined at a distance, uncertain if we were enemy. We waved and shouted in Greek. From her throat ascended a cry of woe. She elevated her lance, pointing north as to some theater of horror, then wheeled and spurred in that direction.

With the dawn our horses could travel. We followed the girl's trail. Our party was still ahead of the main body; their dust could be seen eight or nine miles to the rear. The lass's prints led over a rise. We crested it to a bend in a dry course, backed against chalk bluffs. Such a scene spread before our vision as to brand itself in recall, unspeakable and ineradicable.

At first it seemed only that a great fire had scourged the basin, as if burned-down cookfires had been abandoned, pocking the earth. Then one realized that each pit had been a person. Each had been a young girl.

We dismounted, at no officer's order but impelled by horror. On foot the doughtiest advanced. One sought to look away, yet the ghastliness compelled him. Beneath the bluffs, horses had been slaughtered, disemboweled and decapitated. These were arranged in a ring, fifty-seven in all, when they were counted later. Before each were the incinerated flesh and bones of a girl. Every one had been beheaded. In the center, crucified upside down upon two crossed timbers, hung the corpse of a lass. Her skull too had been taken. Such desecrations of person as bear no profit to recount had been perpetrated upon her flesh, as no doubt they had before their immolation, on that of all the others.

This was Aella, Little Whirlwind, trikona-mate of Eleuthera and Selene, the courier who had made a prize of the prairie hen.

The girls' bones had been pounded into the chalk by the hooves of their murderers' horses, then the mass spaded up and heaped in piles, the remains of each confounded with all others. The arena entire was scored with foot strikes and slathered with evil-looking signs and symbols.