Last of the Amazons (29 page)

30

AT THE THRESHOLD
OF VICTORY

T
he straits of the Euripus separate the mainland from the island of Euboea. The narrows are a quarter mile. I rode out that night with Damon.

I had long rehearsed this hour. I knew how I would touch him, take him again as my lover. I had worked out what to say and how to say it.

In the event, all fell out otherwise.

It was dark when we reached the straits. Cressets flared; the site seethed with industry. Progress was spectacular. Where the channel had been looked now like dry land. The causeway spanned three hundred fifty of the four hundred yards needed. This was the least of it. The Tower People had taken command; they had founded not only the central axis of stone, wide enough for a span of oxen, but built out trestles at each flank, along which riders could advance three abreast. Sidescreens protected against seaborne counterattack; the span bristled like a fortress. Drawn by bounties, adventurers had swum the straits at night, holing numbers of Athenian craft and incinerating others. On our shore the Tower People and Chalybes carved finishing touches in a great rolling drop bridge. This would be warped into place for the attack. The Athenians had erected a palisade where the ramp would crash. But what would this serve, manned only by old men and boys?

Damon and I passed among the host. Here were more troops, and of keener spirit, than besieged the city itself. No captain of Amazonia contributed. These were Scyths and Thracians and Getai, under their own.

My lover and I drew up, overlooking the channel.

“My mother and two sisters are there,” Damon said. “Their children are with them. My brother's wife. I have aunts and cousins and grandparents.”

With this, I saw all hope had ended for us.

“Theseus must come down now,” Damon declared. “Eleuthera will get the fight she came for.”

He meant the Athenians would descend from their bastion atop the Acropolis. They had no choice. They must break out, do or die, to breach our lines and destroy the causeway.

We returned to the city around noon. The camp on Ares' Hill thrilled with some fresh crisis. The Council convened; slopes teemed with warrioresses in a state of agitation. I hailed Glauke Grey Eyes. “What has happened?”

“Follow me,” she commanded.

She spit the tale as we mounted to Eleuthera's command compound. Antiope, Grey Eyes said, had come down from the Acropolis. Our lady had appeared at the head of the Three Hundred Steps an hour after dawn, mounted on Sneak Biscuits, and been permitted to cross, with an escort of King's Companions, to our camp.

“Antiope came before Eleuthera,” Grey Eyes narrated, “bearing her war shield. She set her knee to the earth and her shield at Eleuthera's feet. These were her words:

“‘Our two sides are locked in an impasse which neither can win; all that remains is a bloodbath, destroying both—Athenians now, tal Kyrte later. I know no way out but swear to you, sister, and pledge my holiest oath upon it: I will do anything to procure peace. Name the sacrifice and I will bear it: my life and that of my child, if you so command. You have won. State that price you need to satisfy your honor and I will pay it.' ”

Among tal Kyrte the shield represents a warrior's pride; her victories and wounds are recorded upon it; it is synonymous with her soul; it may never be relinquished. Even in death the warrior's shield lies at her shoulder, emblem of her integrity, in this life and the next.

Eleuthera's wrath dissolved before Antiope's gesture of submission. Who had shown such greatness of soul? Her love for Antiope rekindled.

Eleuthera addressed the Council. “Let us withdraw,” she proposed. “We have received our queen's capitulation. We have conquered Athens's king. This is victory. Let us go home!”

Of all people, it was Hippolyta who debarred this. She banished Antiope from the camp and reproved the people, declaring that if they returned to their homeland bearing some imperfect or conditional victory, their rivals of the plains would eat them alive.

“You understood when we embarked upon this war, sisters, that the stakes were all or nothing. You may not back off now. The causeway complete, nothing will stay the cataclysm. We must bathe in blood. Prepare yourselves. I will not let you act otherwise!”

So contrary to expectation are the workings of fate. For now, at the terminal hour, it came Eleuthera who called for peace and Hippolyta who demanded war.

Damon champed to return to his people now, to tell what he had seen at the straits. Eleuthera would not let him go. Past midnight she addressed the Council. She rejected Hippolyta's interpretation of events. “Victory is victory! We have it. As for allies who may protest, let them take it to hell!”

The following were the terms she proposed, which, if the Council so ratified, Damon would carry to Theseus and the Athenians:

“Abandon your city this night. Accept safe passage through our lines. Our allies will not be informed. Each man of Athens may take his arms and one garment. Antiope may depart too; we will not prevent her. Take to your ships with your women and children. Settle elsewhere, in Italy or Iberia, anywhere you wish. Cede us possession of the city, all gold and treasure, and the fame of having driven you forth. This will suffice for our honor. With this we can withdraw. Later you may return and reoccupy your country. We don't care what you do once we are gone.

“You have as much time to answer as it takes one brand to burn down to ashes. For our allies' ears are long and they will never permit this, should they learn.”

The Council approved, Hippolyta dissenting. Damon committed the proposal to memory. I was sent with him, to translate and to ensure there was no miscommunication. I rode in armor, on Daybreak. Stuff accompanied me as my novice.

31

THE WATCH
COMMANDER'S TOWER

T
heseus accepted.

The Athenians packed up in the dark. The mobilization went with remarkable swiftness, considering the stakes and the risk of discovery. Stuff and I were held at the watch commander's tower. For the first time we could see the enemy close up. He was a mess. Nearly every man was wounded; the maimed and blinded made a third of the ranks. Rations were exhausted; the foe had neither wine nor bread nor splints to bake it with. He gnawed grain raw and the leather of his own shoes. I felt revulsion to observe this, not out of compassion for these beleaguered wretches, though God knows they deserved it, but for the degradation of spirit inflicted on both sides by this honorless war.

Our site of detention was the eastern bastion of the Fortress, the great defense work that ringed the summit of the Rock. Directly beneath our battlement the summit square seethed with the press of men (and the women they had kept with them to cook and clean) massing before the portals by which the mob would make their getaway.

At once a murmur came. Clearly its sense was alarm. Athenians were pointing in agitation to the camps of the besiegers below. Stuff and I peered over the parapet to the lines of tal Kyrte. Other troops could be seen hastening up in overwhelming numbers, moving in behind our lines and on the hills beyond. They lit great bonfires. A second ring of besiegers took position to the rear of ours.

An Athenian corporal passed. “Betrayed,” he spat.

Men seized and bound us. We must kneel at swordpoint; a guard was posted over us.

The troops streaming in below, we were made to understand, were Borges' and Saduces'. Give these buggers credit: they had not only sniffed out the double-cross Eleuthera and Theseus had planned for them, but got ten thousand back from the causeway, across miles in the dark, and into blocking position, annulling for the Athenians all possibility of escape.

The Scyths put up picket fire after picket fire, making a show of it, while those clansmen who had acquired snatches of Greek bawled up to the defenders, taunting them that their scheme had been sold out.

“Make out your wills, men of Athens!”

“Leave everything to us!”

The causeway would be completed tomorrow, the Scyths called.

“Your wives will be our chattel!”

“Your daughters will be our whores!”

All night they kept it up. They detailed the crucifixion that awaited the old men and boys on the island and the fates of the matriarchs and maidens when their captors had wrung the last amusement from them.

Stuff and I were not permitted to speak or to vacate our kennel, even to heed nature's call. The Athenians had taken our weapons; clearly they would slice our throats when the morning's fight began.

I asked if I might get a message to Damon. The watch sergeant laughed in my face.

Two hours before dawn, Damon came on his own. He had water for us, even a heel of bread. He convinced our jailers that we were no spies but as much victims of Borges' stroke as the Athenians. We were freed at last and our weapons returned. Damon himself was in armor. Within the hour, he informed us, the defenders would make their break from the Rock.

Theseus would lead. Damon had seen him. His fractured left arm had been splinted and bound to his chest with straps of ox-hide. A half shield, bronze over oak, had been riveted to his breastplate. His scalp, torn in the clash with Eleuthera, had been stitched back. He bore two score other wounds, Damon reported, including a broken foot (bound now to a stump), ruptures of both groins, and half his jaw sheared away. When he crossed this night to address the commanders, every man on the Rock stood, wounded included. All would arm, even the blinded and concussed; men who could not walk would limp on staffs or crawl on their knees. Boys and women armed in the panoplies of the dead and strapped up to move out. One had to admire them: they showed a kind of nobility, these carpenters and mechanics, unbred for war.

Couriers, Damon told me and Stuff, had slipped from the citadel bearing appeals for aid. Six had been dispatched to the Athenian camp on Ardettos and five to Parnes, in the hope that one would get through. Runners had been sent to Thebes and the Isthmus, and more to Marathon and Phaleron Bay, where lay offshore those fisher boats and barges which comprised the evacuation fleet. These would be sent with calls for aid to Aegina and Salamis, the islands which the invaders had not yet touched.

The watch relief came while Damon told us this. The commander was Philippus, “Dew Lap,” the same carefree chap who had been with us in Amazonia. He was in hale spirits, bearing news. The citadel's forges, he reported, which till now had worked only bronze and iron, had this night been assigned a more illustrious task.

“Gold.”

Theseus was melting down every anklet and earring on the Rock, Philippus reported, casting them into ingots the size a man could carry. “The king will pack a bar with each courier sent out, promising the haul entire to any ally who comes to our aid.”

He and Damon exchanged a glance. Clearly they anticipated no takers. My lover turned to Stuff. He could sneak the lass out of the city, he proposed, even if the guard ordered me detained. “Can she speak Greek?”

My novice would not leave me.

Damon grunted. “Another hero.”

Philippus let us rise and look out. Night fog had settled; it was too dark to see. We could hear besiegers rousing and arming for the final fight. I asked my lover what he thought of this.

“I have given up thinking.”

Stuff watched him with iron eyes.

“I hope you die,” she said.

Damon turned to her, not unkindly, and set a hand upon her curls. “In that petition, my dear, I fear you shall soon be satisfied.”

BOOK ELEVEN

THE BATTLE