Last of the Amazons (26 page)

Down streets gone to rubble I raced on foot. Riderless horses ranged everywhere. Twice I clutched at bridles, only to be driven off by the snap of teeth nearly taking off my hand. At last I came on a Scythian pony trailing a dragline; I caught it and managed to claim a seat. Below where the houses had been excavated, the last of our troop were being butchered like geese.

I was at the head of a lane. Though the foe had felled every tree of the quarter for fuel and timber, somehow a lone olive had been spared. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I stared, absorbed in wonder. Then from behind its silver bole emerged Selene.

She held, as in a dream, mounted upon Daybreak. I could see the horse's breastplate of ox-hide lapped with bronze. Selene wore no helmet. Feathers of eagle and osprey adorned her hair; her face was painted vermilion and black. She came on the run. My bride, I thought. I longed only to fly to her arms. I saw her elevated axe and heard her war cry. The blood drained to my soles.

I wheeled, flaying my pony such blows of my bare hand, since I had neither whip not quirt, as to start both his blood and my own. I knew the quarter. The notion occurred that I could fox Selene by fleeing down lanes unknown to her. But in my derangement I forgot the blocks had been leveled. Careening into the Street of the Weavers, I glanced over my shoulder; Selene had shot the angle, cutting me off. I nearly unhinged my horse's jaw, wheeling him into the facing lane. At the corner he lost footing; we slid sideways and crashed into the wall. I could feel my hip and knee give way as the weight of the beast drove them into the face; my head and shoulder whacked with such force that my helmet, cinched with an ox-hide thong thick as two thumbs, snapped clean and went sailing.

Here came Selene at my heels. I whipped up to the Square of the Return. The temple of Hephaestus had dominated this eminence, but now only its steps remained, fronting a maze of trenches where the treasury had stood. Selene chased me down one side and up the other. At the crown was the threshold stone, double high, where the coffer door had set. My pony hit this at the knees. Mount and rider spilled in a tangle. Selene reined-in above. I was down, wedged between the pediment and my thrashing, kicking horse, who frantically sought to right himself on the stone. His hock hit me, hurling me into the wall. The animal pounded to his feet; I hung from him by the mane like a climber from a cliff. I could see Selene's knee drive Daybreak into position to butcher me. Her weapon was not the
bipennis,
with one blade and counterfacing spike, but the
pelekus,
the true double axe. A fan of raven feathers pended from its crown; I could see them twist in the sunlight as she elevated the warhead to open me from craw to gut sack. I thought only: Take the blow from the front. Will it strike you strange, brothers? In that instant, awaiting the blow of my lover that would send me to hell, all I cared was not to prove unworthy in her eyes.

The raven quills stayed. The axe did not fall. “God help me!” I heard Selene bawl. “Help me to strike!”

Some force stopped her. I did not stay to find out what. I vaulted to my pony's back, beating so furiously with my heels I could feel his ribs bow.

How long does a battle last? Who can tell, in the soup of it? I found myself afoot amid a huddle of infantry. Amazon cavalry in hundreds drove us in a rout. We fell back to the Antiochid district, directly beneath the Acropolis. Here stood the mansions of the great families, the court dwellings of Cecrops and Aegeus and Erechtheus and the ancient bastions of Erichthonius and Cranaus and Actaeus, constructed of stones so massive they could not have been set in place by men but only giants. The foe had not been able to wreck these citadels when she leveled the surrounding shanties. As our companies fled into this province, a miraculous revolution took place.

The stoneworks of the great manors broke up the enemy's pursuit. Mounds of rubble offered us ammunition. A wall stood under construction bisecting the Hoplites' Square; our masons had thrown it up before Borges' Scyths had overrun the quarter. Our corps now poured over this in flight. Inspired by heaven, or only the serendipity of the magazine, men snatched up stones and hurled them in fusillades upon the horsewomen. It worked! If not at first upon the Amazons themselves, who smelled victory and ravened for our blood, then upon their animals, to whom blows about the chest, legs, and head, and especially the barrages of stones beating about their feet, broke their order. The foe's rush split apart in the face of these broadsides.

The square had been carved into trenches by our defenders earlier in the siege, and these now worked further mischief to the enemy, for when her reinforcing companies burst onto the site, their rear elements, blinded amid the dust and smoke, pressed unwittingly upon the fore, driving them onto the excavations. The floors of these lay spiked with a jumble of fittings, debris, timbers, and stakes, onto whose jagged ends horses and riders now plunged at the rush. Was this luck or a god's hand? Who cared? For the first time our companies heard the foe cry in anguish and saw her bleed red blood.

The quarter itself proved wonderfully defensible. For these ancient estates had been strongholds in their day; their construction, of walls enclosing courts, acted like a series of forts. Often two or three commanded a square, their proximity producing interlocking fields of fire, so that one house protected another. Our men mounted to courtyard walls as if to battlements and from them slung stones and bricks. Here too the prowess of our Cretan archers proved miraculous, for, given an elevated platform, and a stationary one, they could shoot like gods.

The fight, which had started as a sally, turned into an all-day war. Our side began to discover its courage. Singing the Hymn to Athena Promachos, our men, first in tens and twelves, then in platoons as great as forty, braved rushes upon the foe. The trick, we learned, was to lap shields into an unbroken wall, projecting from this the shafts and warheads of the eight-foot spear. Again it was less the Amazons who were unnerved than their horses. The creatures seemed to perceive the phalanx as a single beast of bronze. They spooked and shied and, once spiked, needed the whip to be induced to charge again.

The defenders had learned to knit a line of houses into a wall. We had got the knack of throwing up barricades between buildings or even between mounds of rubble, binding a block or square into a defensible redoubt. We knew too to punch holes in the party walls between the houses, fighting and retreating from one to the next. As the foe advanced, our fellows bolted through one mousehole to the next, sealing each with rubble and timbers as they went. It did not require mason-built walls to repel cavalry, we learned, but only a pile of stones too high for a horse to leap and pocked with too many voids to overrun. Better yet, walls and ammunition were the same. Had you shivered your eight-footer? Grab a stone and sling it. A two-pounder can knock out a jawful of teeth. A fiver will stave a skull.

Since each lane mounted in elevation toward the Acropolis, the defenders discovered they could retreat uphill from one position to the next. For the foe, taking one fort made it no easier to take the next, but each exacted its toll on warriors and horses. This was not how Amazons fought. They hated it. It was unknightly. Worse for them, in those lanes beneath the overstanding Acropolis, artillery of stones could be called in from above to cover a beleaguered position. A wing of Taurian infantry had backed a platoon of ours against the face of the Rock. Tons thundered upon the foe from above, knocking half to hell in a single bombardment, breaking their charge and daunting all enemy units to try again.

Yet again they came. Toward evening I saw Hippolyta thunder into the Square of the Basket Bearers. She led a hundred upon our corps of forty. We hunkered, shields lapped and spear points projecting, while they flung shaft after shaft upon us. Yet the wall of shields did not break, and when the horse rush receded, we found courage to pursue, putting up a clamor. We had learned to honeycomb our lines, so that the second rank of spearmen could thrust through the gaps left open by the first, thus doubling our front of pikes, and to maintain this cohesion in retreat as well as attack. Again, it worked. If we kept together, it worked.

There is this too about an army of disunited allies, as our besiegers were. Each is jealous of his turf; he fends his own patch like a staked cur, but will not donate a gob of spit to preserve his fellow's. Our companies found seams between the foes' camps. Here we could fight. Within such pockets Athenian squadrons could take ground and even fortify it.

Theseus fought with superhuman valor, migrating from battalion to battalion across the field. It seemed he knew every countryman's name, and his wife's and children's too, and to each standing at his shoulder infused tribute and resolve. Or perhaps it was a god taking our king's form.

Lykos too displayed courage commensurate to his rank. He had come back through the lines from the bastion at Lykabettos, with two companies led by the heroes Peteos, called “the Tower,” and Stichios, hailed as “Ox” for the ferocious rush he employed in wrestling, which proved of even more terrific effect in close fighting. With this guard Lykos joined Theseus, Pirithous, and the hero Peleus. These, seconded by Menestheus, Peteos' son, Pylades the boxer and Telephos, champions of the city, thrust on foot into the teeth of the enemy advance. You could see down the hill the pockets of resistance created by each principal. Where the channel of the Ilissus divides is a footbridge called the Girdle, because in ancient times condemned men were led across it, by their belts, to their executions. Here Lykos, fighting with only Peteos, Ox, and their squires, held back half a hundred horse, enduring clouds of missiles, then rushing with their spears upon the foremost riders. Theseus and Pirithous fought with matching valor, holding first the crossroads before the shop of the barber Timaeus, then the mouth of the Street of the Saddlers. But such a defense of champions could not hold. Each pocket drew more and more gallants of the foe, fired to make a famous kill. The heroes fell back, making a wall of their shields, into which the shafts of the foe affixed in such numbers that each face bristled like a hedgehog's back.

In the end the foe's numbers were simply too many. Pocket by pocket, Athenian resistance broke. The exhausted remnant fell back toward the Rock. The Enneapylon still held. Hundreds reached safety through the Sacred and Aegeid Gates. This was on the west. I was on the south. These were the companies under Theseus. Our only way in was through the Callirhoe or the Melitic, and we were cut off from them by an eighth of a mile of field. We could see the ramparts and our countrymen lowering lines and ladders, crying, Hurry brothers! Fall back!

The companies outside the walls were down to a thousand men, half of whom were wounded so severely as to be unable to fight, with another quarter incapable even of getting off the field under their own power. About these swirled horse troops of Amazonia and Scythia and tribesmen on foot in numbers ten times theirs. The hero Pirithous had fallen to wounds, beaten by Borges the Scyth. He had been evacuated to the summit. The knight Peleus had likewise succumbed, driven down by Eleuthera. Theseus and the surviving captains rallied the mass into a perimeter, shield to shield. Two hundred feet separated us from the wall and deliverance.

We could not get across. Eleuthera, Borges, and their champions had massed in our way. They could have overrun the walls, so great were their numbers, but for the fire of our artillerymen on the summit, who kept up barrages of stones, some as massive as fifty and sixty pounds, to keep a lane clear between ourselves and safety.

The foe soon got the hang of dodging these rock falls. She reckoned how far she could advance and how long each battery took to reload. Each time our pack bolted into the no-man's-land between ourselves and the walls, the foe's companies hurled themselves upon us. Our countrymen above were forced to break off their volleys, lest they pulverize us along with the foe, and in this interval the enemy ground our rush to mince.

Night was falling. Four times our corps sallied; four times we were beaten back. With each, more of ours fell wounded. Worse, when we abandoned the safety of one position, Scythian and Amazon cavalry seized it and launched from it yet more terrific volleys.

Eleuthera ranged before the Callirhoe Gate, barring our entry. “Coward with the heart of a deer!” she bawled to Theseus. “You should have fought me when you had the chance! Your corpse would now feed crows and dogs, but you would at least have fallen with honor!”

Our pack had strength for one more rush. We knew it and so did the foe. All vaunting ceased. I could see Eleuthera prowling the front, mounted on her long-legged Soup Bones. The champions of Amazonia massed at her shoulder. Hippolyta and Skyleia; Alcippe and Stratonike; Glauke, Enyo, Deino, Adrasteia, Tecmessa, Xanthe, Evandre, Antibrote, Pantariste, Electra, and Selene. And Borges and Saduces and Hermon of the allies. Here was their chance to cut out the living heart of our corps, and to do so before the eyes of the last defenders. Across the field, infantry and squires of the foe scurried in hundreds, hauling off all impediments to cavalry, clearing the field for our slaughter.

Our company formed into a hollow square, meaning those on the right had to advance backward, so that their shields would protect that flank. Theseus passed among the company. No speeches now. “Athena Protectress!” he cried, cinching up. “Athens and Victory!”

With a shout the mass pushed off. Scythian foot troops immediately swept in to seize the heights of our vacated position. The foe began pouring bowfire from there. Amazon horse attacked from both flanks. We huddled in our moving square, men falling and tripping, particularly the side I held to, the right, which must advance backpedaling. The Amazons shot their bolts across the tops of our shields, right firing on left and left on right. A man hit may not fall but must make his way as best he could, for to drop underfoot would impede his mates, who were already burdened with wounded. The Scyths fell upon the rear in waves, attacking not only with spears and axes but with great stones, twenty- and thirty-pounders, which the tribesmen bore in two hands over their heads and hurled in a howling rush upon the shields of our rear ranks. When these buckled, the savages flung themselves bodily upon the facings, clawing at the shield rims and pulling them down by the weight of their flesh. The foe attacked clad in mantles of bearskin and bull's hide, many with heads and horns still on, which rendered their apparition even more beastlike, and against which the thrusting sword was worthless as a wand. The brutes poured flush among us. The Amazons fired indiscriminately into the mass; one found himself employing as cover the torsos of the very tribesmen beneath whose onslaught he reeled. So many sprouted arrows, foe as well as friend, that men began stumbling and fouling on the shafts which jutted, numerous as seamstress's pins, from shields and breastplates and living flesh. Artillery stones continued to plummet from the chutes two hundred feet above, keeping clear the last fifty feet before the walls. The sound these boulders made as they shattered on the stone was appalling, not to say the blast of shards which mowed men down like sling bullets, and the choking clouds which roiled upon all, enlarging the theater of terror.