Last of the Amazons (35 page)

36

THE COMPLICITY OF
THE GODS

U
ncle brought his tale of battle to its close. The hour was late beside the beached ships on the strand at the Nave of Mercy. Damon glanced to Father, as if asking his permission to append an afterword to his yarn. The company remarked this exchange, curious. Father nodded. Damon took a draught of wine and resumed:

“Now, brothers,” he addressed his shipmates of the posse, “I will tell you something you do not know. Or rather, confirm that which you may have long suspected.”

Damon told of a patrol dispatched to the hill country south of Oinoe, some four or five days after the Amazons' decampment. The troop's captain was Xenophanes, brother of the general Lykos; Damon was sergeant of the first platoon, Father its lieutenant. At that site called the Horns, just below the pass, the company came upon a gang of bounty hunters. The bandits had cornered several wounded Amazons in a herder's hut and were setting up to smoke them out.

“The villains took off when they saw us,” Damon recounted. “We kept back, out of range of the Amazon bows, on a rise overlooking the cottage. Suddenly one of the women emerged, on foot, carrying in her arms the body of another. Elias and I drew up in astonishment.

“The maid was Selene.

“She advanced within a hundred feet of our position. She looked dehydrated and emaciated. If she recognized Elias and me, she did not let on. She identified herself to our captain and called out in Greek that the warrior in her arms was her sister, Chryssa, severely wounded but alive. If our commander would guarantee safe conduct out of Attica to the disabled woman, that is, permit her to be borne on a litter to rejoin the Amazon column withdrawing north, then she, Selene, would surrender herself and serve in any capacity we appointed. Such a prize was unheard of, to take an Amazon alive, and excited our captain Xenophanes no end. He ordered my brother and me forward to examine the wounded warrioress.

“We obeyed. We could see even at a distance that the woman's overcloak was the same that Chryssa habitually wore. We both recognized Chryssa's jerkin with its sign of the turtle, and her Phrygian cap trimmed with white marten. But when we got closer we saw that the woman was not Chryssa.

“It was Eleuthera.

“She was alive.

“Elias and I had now drawn up directly before Selene. For our captain's eyes the maid still feigned not to know us, yet it was plain she understood that one word would mean her end and Eleuthera's. I shall never forget the expression on my brother's face. It went without saying that to capture alive the great Eleuthera, whom Athens thought dead and buried, would catapult to fame not only ourselves but our posterity. Down centuries our family would reap the renown of this exploit. My brother met my eyes, then turned back to our captain.

“‘It is the woman's sister, by name Chryssa,' he called. ‘I recognize her from the Amazon homeland.'

“At once I confirmed this.

“Selene held her aspect emotionless. She whistled sharply to the tree line. At once two novices materialized (Stuff and another I did not recognize) carrying a reed litter. Elias and I volunteered to escort the outfit north; Xenophanes assented and assigned a detail of eight to accompany us, to protect against the gangs of cutthroats who infested the hills at that time.

“Selene stripped her arms and surrendered herself. Our captain took her into custody.”

Here Damon drew up and again glanced to Father, who was seated at his left beside the beached ships. The brothers' eyes met, much as they must have in that hour.

“Why did we do it, comrades?” Damon resumed to the posse. “Perhaps a god commanded, compelling our complicity. Perhaps we could not but acknowledge the greatness of the Amazon nation and reckon the ordeal its corps yet faced seeking to get home, or the need it had of Eleuthera, who was the race's last best hope. Perhaps the selflessness of Selene's gesture touched our hearts.

“In any event we sealed the compact. We told our lie and made it stick.

“Thus Eleuthera was granted passage home. Thus, after certain negotiations and appropriations, Selene came to serve Elias and be governess to our young Bones here and her sister, Europa. And thus did Selene, all these years later, come to break from her indenture, and we, this posse, to toil in her pursuit.”

37

A NEW ORDER

D
amon's narration had now brought us to the present.

The ships of the posse continued east. We were now well inside the Amazon Sea and within days, Prince Atticus reckoned, of striking the Mound City. Yet nothing we could see on shore resembled the country that Damon had described as existing as recently as twenty years past.

The plateau beneath which we coasted, which Uncle had portrayed in his chronicle as teeming with horses and game, was scored now in the present with waggon ruts and pocked with rude turf granges. Dirty settlements squatted wherever a rill cut down to the sea. These, we learned, were Borges' property. Vassal villages. They were growing barley and emmer wheat. This was the Scyths' new business. They did not farm the land themselves, such drudgery being beneath their knightly calling, only swept down twice a year to exact tribute. Borges took this tariff not in produce, the villagers told us, but in a potent red stout which the locals stored in huge clay jars with the grains of barley still floating on top. The Scyths ringed these vats like pigs at a trough, sucking the brew up through reeds.

What of the Amazons? We had not seen a single one. Only their graves.

The posse had remarked these in numbers for the prior twenty days. They had appeared on promontories visible from the sea, great barrows heaped up in the shape of crescent shields. When our company landed for fresh water or to give the horses a run, more mounds were found. At the Nestrus and Hebrus rivers our parties trekked inland, led by guides. They were shown fords and passes, sites of battle. More graves were seen at the Danuvius and the Tyras. Clearly Hippolyta's forecast had proved true: those same clansmen who had played servitor to the Amazons at their apex of power had turned predator in their hour of vulnerability.

The posse continued east. With each stop ashore, Atticus inquired of the locals: Had they seen a lone Amazon? Had they seen one traveling with a girl?

The villagers shook their heads.

No Amazons.

No more.

One morning our lookouts spotted wild goats on a headland; Atticus sent in a hunting troop to bag a few for the pot. Beside a stream they discovered a party of women, washing clothes. To our fellows' amazement the maids inquired of our “other ships.”

Three vessels had put in on this site two days prior, the women reported. The master of this squadron had asked after us, describing our craft precisely. Atticus sought out the village headman. He returned with a letter addressed to us.

“From Theseus,” the prince affirmed to the posse, as astonished as they. He skimmed the roll. “The king has come out from Athens. He has overshot us, so he declares, but will hold for us, east, at the Mound City.”

The squadron put back to sea. Within hours two sail were sighted, Athenian, making for us. Our men hauled, cheering. But when the ships came alongside, our countrymen aboard manned the oars and nothing else. They were held at swordpoint by clansmen of the Scyths.

“Your king is in our hands,” their skipper bawled across, “and commands you to follow us in.”

The Scyths did not board our vessels in mass, only sent pilots over to take us in charge. The dandy posted to Atticus' ship was no seaman but a buck baron of the plains, handsome and shirtless, wearing doeskin trousers and gold jewelry in such quantity it threatened to pitch the ship out of trim from its weight alone. He was in soaring spirits, clapping our lads like long-lost mates. “You hunt the Amazon,” he divined. “How much? How much?” He meant for her head, if we got it.

Atticus informed him we did not want her head. The buck laughed as if he would fall down. All Greeks were crazy.

It took minutes to discover that he meant Eleuthera, not Selene.

Who was Selene? He had never heard of Selene! He cared nothing for Selene!

“'Leuth'ra, 'Leuth'ra,” the young blood repeated, shouting, as if we were the numbest skulls he had ever encountered.

Our proudfoot narrated his account. The race of Amazons, who had numbered at their peak above a hundred and fifty thousand, lingered now at their last extremity, down to two or three thousand. The main of this remnant, older women and girls, had long since withdrawn north through the Gate of Storms to the Land of Perpetual Snow in the Rhipaean Caucasus. War parties still ventured south however. One of two hundred had struck the herds of Princes Maues and Panasagoras—Borges' son and nephew—three months ago, driving off two thousand prime stock. A chase had ensued and a battle been fought, north beyond Lake Maeotis, in which half the Amazons had been slain and Eleuthera herself gravely wounded.

Clearly this was the extremity that Theseus had reported to Selene that noon on our farm. It was why Selene had bolted, to offer the Underworld her own life in place of Eleuthera's. It was why the posse pursued her now.

Eleuthera was forty-one years old, our Scythian brave reported, but still preeminent, the last of her race the clansmen still feared. Maues and Panasagoras were scouring every league of the Wild Lands for her now. When they tracked her down and killed her, the last of the free Amazons would be exterminated, and they, the princes, would have won renown everlasting, to eclipse even Borges, and have attained for themselves supremacy of the steppe.

Our buck assumed that we, the posse, were after Eleuthera too. He would not believe our tale of Selene. He had never heard anything so ridiculous.

The shore we coasted was pastureland descending from high plateau. By nightfall the expanse teemed with the hordes of Scythia. Ahead our lookouts reported harbor beacons. Galleys and traders, broad-beamers, could be glimpsed at anchor. Atticus made to put ashore where we were, several miles short of the Mound City, deeming the run-in too risky in the failing light.

“No stop! No stop!” commanded our gallant. He shouted to his mates in the other ships, who at once bared their blades above our comrades' throats. “Fires ahead! Lights! Go on!”

Atticus acceded. The ships made for the channel. Thus, on the ninety-ninth day since their embarkation from Athens, the vessels of the posse rowed in and beached upon that shore whose bastion, the Mound City, had once been the seat of the Northern, or Lycasteia, Amazons, the tribe of Antiope, Eleuthera, and Selene.

38

PRINCES OF THE PLAINS

T
he first items the Scyths seized were our horses. These would be impounded temporarily, Maues' adjutant assured Atticus and our officers, though it was clear from the glee with which his compatriots took possession of the animals that they would never appear in Athenian livery again.

Our complement was united with Theseus and his crews. The Scyths herded us into one pack, officers alongside men, and drove the lot into a wharfside stock pen whose rails, to keep out wolves, had been topped with rolls of that wicked thorn the Amazons call
agre arra,
“penance maker.” From these kennels the captives could view their hosts stripping the ships of all articles of value. Our guards had already performed this service upon our persons. Throughout two nights, which yielded sleep only in snatches, Father and Damon secured me in the pocket between them, backed by the crews as one, offering such glowers to our jailers as to preserve me, a lass at the ripest of ages in these blackguards' eyes, from such uses as they plainly wished to make of me.

The third dawn, Maues and Panasagoras appeared, compassed by their lifeguard of knights. Theseus was hauled forward. It is the nature of the savage not to address but to berate. Our king must endure cataracts of abuse, physical as well as verbal, delivered at such a pitch of outrage, not to say inebriation, as to convince one and all that the sole outcome would be bloody murder. It is all theater to these villains. They champed to torch the ships, which they hated as bearers of evil from afar, and would have, clearly, but for the more attractive prospect of selling craft and crews in one bundle. In the end they detained Theseus, Atticus, and the vessels' captains. The crews were released, or, more accurately, kicked out, with orders to report back by sunset. “The savages reckon we won't stray far,” Father observed.

The men were directed by their officers to keep in a body for their own protection. It went without saying that an attempt would be made to retake the ships. Meanwhile, we were free to gawk about the city. Father, Damon, Philippus, and two others—“Beam” and “Mite,” who had come out with Theseus—formed themselves into an outfit.

Mite took charge of me. We were all dirty as death, without even shoes. This put us at a level with the locals. I have never seen such a verminous aggregation. In Amazon days, no permanent habitation had been permitted at the Mound City. The place remained grass and earthworks, consecrated for use only at the season of the Gathering and left to God and the elements the other ten months.

Now a year-round city occupied the site. A boomtown. Its denizens were miners and gamblers, merchants, traders in horses and women, slaves, grain, furs, and gold. Father interrogated our new comrades on Theseus' advent. When had the king's ships left Athens, and why? Had Theseus not sworn never to participate in such a posse?

Mite brought the tale up to the mark.

Two days after Atticus' ships had sailed from Athens, Theseus had made to offer sacrifice at the tomb of Antiope, beseeching her favor and protection on behalf of the men of the fleet. The king had made something of a show of this, Mite reported, donating an ox and fifty sheep for a great public feast. Crowds thronged the square, eager for a free feed. But as the priests drew forth the bull for sacrifice, the earth shook. So violent was the quake that the very lintel of the tomb crashed. In the city scores of buildings toppled. Hundreds were killed and injured. That this calamity had befallen, not alone before the tomb of our king's beloved, but on the point of sacrifice of that beast sacred to his reputed father, Poseidon Earthshaker, was an omen whose import it took no seer or mantis to divine.

“The king's luck had turned evil,” Mite narrated, “and everybody knew it. I served as wrangler on his spread at Phyle. What broke his heart, I saw, was not just the bane of heaven's enmity, which he had endured all his life, but the treachery and ingratitude of his own countrymen. To behold his political rivals seizing upon his grief to further their own careers—this was the reed that broke the ass's back. Theseus despaired for the democracy, in whose cause he had donated all. The people hated him and called for his blood. What remained for him at Athens?

“In any event, the prospect of a sea voyage, and the chance of roaming again upon the wild plains of the east, no longer seemed such a chore. He packed his kit himself in minutes.”

Father questioned Mite further. We had heard that Theseus, en route to the Amazon Sea, had offered sacrifice more than once, seeking to appease the ghost of Antiope.

Mite confirmed this. He himself had trekked in the party twice, at Chalcidician Torone and later at the Nine Ways. “But she never comes. Nothing. Not a whisper.”

Damon asked what Mite made of this. What did Theseus want, summoning the shade of his Amazon bride? Did he seek forgiveness for permitting her to fight that final dawn? Did he long to rejoin her beneath the earth? Was communion with her his sole object, voyaging again to the Wild Lands?

“You tell me, sir. He's gone bloody balmy, if you want my part.”

That night our captors rounded up both companies, Theseus' and Atticus', and marched us to the earthworks east of the city. Savages in thousands ringed a pit in which men had been bound spread-eagled to scaffolds. They were ours. A score, arrested trying to steal a Tyrian cutter.

The men had been scalped alive and mutilated. Now Theseus, Atticus, and the ships' captains were driven to the fore to witness as the savages applied fire. King and officers were bound to execution posts and beaten with fists and a type of cudgel the Scyths call
oiratera,
“man-breaker.” No compulsion of hell or heaven will induce me to recount the tortures these fortune-forsaken souls were compelled to endure, save to note that the spectacle protracted all night, Maues and Panasagoras participating personally and with relish, and our party without exception constrained to look on. Every man anticipated that he too would be dispatched in this fashion, or another equally hideous.

It is the manner of savages, I have said, to thrust themselves into the faces of those they seek to cow, bellowing tirades of abuse, all the while offering kicks and cuffs of stupefying violence. They had learned of Theseus' attempts to summon the ghost of Antiope and scorned this extravagantly.

This is our country now!

No Amazon may enter, dead or alive!

At dawn a courier appeared from Amorges, prince of the Copper River, having ridden, he reported, three days from the north. A war party of six hundred Amazons under the great Eleuthera had been discovered and set upon. The final extermination was at hand.

Ecstatic cries erupted from the multitude. Clansmen bawled for their horses; grooms scattered to rig kit and armor. At once Theseus volunteered our company. We had sailed all this way, he declared, to take vengeance on the Amazons; let us join with our Scythian brothers and finish the job!

The hordes greeted this with derision. Yet such is the perversity of the savage that the princes not only embraced Theseus' plan, reckoning no doubt that they would butcher our party as a final delectation to their banquet of slaughter, but even ordered our men provided with horses and arms.

Theseus entreated one final boon of the princes, that they put out of their misery our comrades under torture or, failing that, permit us to end their agony ourselves.

Maues refused. “The dogs and crows will finish them.”

The mob, above ten thousand, mounted and moved out.