Last of the Amazons (21 page)

Indeed they did, now they had no choice.

Stay and fight!

Defend the city!

But Theseus would not settle for this. He insisted the vote be tallied not by show of hands or acclamation but that the electorate take station bodily on either side of a line, which he scribed himself with the butt of the
skeptron
into the muck bisecting the square. This was so that all could see who stood where and, more important, that none reverse except in infamy.

Theseus had the Knights awakened before dawn; the corps marshaled in the Horse Square on the Hill of the Muses. Allies had come in overnight: from Thessaly, Pirithous and Peleus with a hundred cavalry and four hundred pikemen; from Crete, the boy-prince Triptolemus with three hundred famed archers; from Sparta, the spearman Amompharetus with eighty armored infantry. The apparition of these heartened the defenders mightily. Theseus spoke, addressing all:

“Knights and Companions, you are the champions of the state, the scions of her noblest houses. You she may count upon to do or die. Yet, if I read you right, another question disquiets your hearts.

“What of our comrades, you wonder, the farmers and craftsmen who constitute our corps? They are not fighters. Many own neither armor nor weapons; the only thing they know of battle is how to run from it. Look in their eyes. They are terrified before this foe and her unprecedented numbers and savagery. Will such troops hold? How shall we command them? Hear, brothers. I will tell you.

“Men in fear crave order. Give it to them. Tell them where to sleep and where to shit. Make no appeal to lofty ideals of patriotism or self-sacrifice. They are too dread-stricken to hear. Just tell them what to do. Keep it simple. ‘Stand there. Hold this. Do that.'

“Your job now is to quell your men's terror. Get proper food into their bellies and proper arms into their fists. Bind your fellows with sweat, for who builds a wall builds valor, and who whets his bronze whets his courage. Let your men grumble; it makes them feel like soldiers. Let them joke, for none can fear and laugh at the same time. Remember that each man's concern is for his own family now. This is natural; do not seek to quell it. Unity will come. The foe will force it upon us.

“A word about arrogance and impatience. Some of you fancy yourselves favored. You offer smart remarks of the husbandmen who comprise our army, naming them rubes and yokels. You err, brothers. For they know something you don't. They know how to endure. Rude, flinty, hard-bitten? These are the qualities Athens needs in this hour, more than heroism, more than brilliance. Therefore, bear your command with humility. Lead, do not condescend. Remember, these are great events and men will rise to them. Treat every man as a soldier. He may surprise you and be one.”

He indicated Peleus and Pirithous, Triptolemus and Amompharetus. “If you fail of inspiration, brothers, look only to these knights who have with such honor crossed seas and mountains to stand at our shoulders. If they will shed their blood for Athens, how may we, her own sons, offer less than our all?

“Lastly, my friends, recall that the worst that can come—death and extinction—may not be robbed of honor unless we so consent. God Himself cannot take this from us: to fall with valor, if fall we must.”

Theseus had barely finished when a cry resounded from the west-facing lines. Men were gesticulating and running. I fell in beside my brother; we mounted the bluff, still chill in shadow, toward the wash of the ascending sun. You know the summit of the Muses' Hill; the Acropolis mounts at its hip while across the laundry-hung rooftops of the Weavers' Quarter, sliced through by the Ceramic Way, arises the Hill of Ares, mate to the Acropolis and stark with its bluff side facing.

Along this crest now horsewomen of the Amazons ascended. A hundred first, in helmets and armor, then another hundred, and another and another. Now with a sound such as no man had ever heard appeared battalions in such numbers as to obliterate the ridgelines from the Ceramicus to the Itonic Gate. A thousand, and a thousand more, and three thousand, and five and seven and ten. These did not charge but walked, absent haste, one hoof set before another, in such myriads as made the stone tremble beneath their tread, and ourselves, observing at range, quake with palsy from sole to crown.

To the fore advanced the enemy commanders. One saw knights of the Scyths and Issedones; horse cohorts of the Massa Getai and Thyssa Getai; Ceraunians and Cicones and Aorsi; Tower Builders and Black Cloaks; Macrones and Colchians, Maeotians and Taurians and Rhipaean Caucasians; cavalry commanders of the Phrygians, Lykians, and Dardanians; brigadiers of the Chalybes and Mysians and Cappadocians; Gagarians and Thracians of the Strymon and the Chersonese; Saii and Tralliai and Androphagi; black Sinds and blond Alans; nation after nation and, at the center atop the Hill of Ares, the Amazons of Themiscyra and Lycasteia, Chadisia and Titaneia.

Eleuthera and Hippolyta advanced before the corps; you could see the former's triple-crested helmet and her elder, bareheaded, with slung
pelekus
and iron-colored plait. Behind them into view ascended rank upon rank. The rising sun shot flares and diadems off their bronze, burnished to incandescence, so that the front they presented was not one of figures individual or human to whom appeal might be made, but an unholy wall of glare and dazzle, blank and faceless and implacable. The line of the foe extended north across what had been the marketplace and cemetery but was now a martial plain, already called by our men the Amazoneum, out of sight round the shoulder of the Acropolis, and south an equal measure, two deep, three, five, seven, until the defenders stared out, it seemed, not upon lines or ranks but a solid sea.

Across from this our poor few hills projected like islands awaiting the flood. It was a queer moment. On the one hand, one could not but stand in terror of this colossal show of arms. Who could stand against such a host? Yet at the same time the spectacle was of such brilliant stagecraft and brought off so impeccably that one felt struck with awe and admiration and appreciated it, apart from its malevolent design, just for the showmanship. No trumpet sounded. No Amazon commander bawled attack. The foe did not start or stir, only stood, across from those she held besieged, a tide of bronze and iron before which no bastion, not even the Rock of Athena, could hope to stand.

23

STARFISH AND
SEA HORSES

N
o assault came at once against the city. The invaders contented themselves for the moment devastating the countryside. Attica is a big place; even the hordes of Amazons and Scyths must take time to sack it all. From atop the Rock one took in the entertainment. For the first days you could make out individual farms as the invaders razed them or, later, watching the smoke ascend in the distance beyond the hills, speculate upon which estate or vineyard now succumbed to the torch. Soon this sport expired; the landscape receded into murk. It was summer and no wind; a pall of smoke hung from Eleusis to Decelea.

That quarter of flats and tenements directly beneath the Acropolis was called then as now “the city.” Its citizen population was about ten thousand, crammed into a maze of lanes and alleys clinging to the slopes at the base of the Rock. Beyond this the boroughs fanned out. “The town.” As today, one went “up” to the city and “down” to the town.

The town was both more populous and more open then. The great houses of the wealthy dominated the hills of the Pnyx, the Nymphs, and the Muses; the wide squares of the Museum, the Palladium, and the hero shrine of the sons of Pandion provided meeting places for citizens and staging areas for troops; while the three great Ways, the Sacred, the Ceramic, and the Panathenaic, facilitated movement from quarter to quarter. About twenty thousand (fifty thousand including women, children, and slaves) inhabited the town in those days. Beyond, the sprawl of suburbs began, and, past this, the countryside with its farms and estates.

The city was walled then. The town was not. An ancient fortification of Pelasgian origin, called in our time the Wall of Aegeus, ringed what are now the town wards of Melite and Itoneia, but this bulwark had fallen down in so many places over the centuries and been rebuilt in such slapdash fashion as to be unserviceable, not to say unfindable, along a third of its length. Along the other two thirds, houses and tenements had been built flush abutting, incorporating the wall itself into the dwelling places. Doors and pass-throughs had been cut, even lanes and carriageways. Theseus had sought to rebuild this ancient circuit, even funding the project from his own purse. But who believed there was need for it? The scheme languished, progressing spottily if at all.

The appearance of the Amazons and Scyths changed that overnight. Beneath the lash of terror, men bricked up alleys and shuttered lanes, threw up breastworks and erected battlements. Brawls broke out over where the new wall should stand, each boroughman seeking to preserve his own kennel while lobbying for the demolition of his neighbor's. Theseus' officers, myself among them, must draft the line. Brick this house up. Tear that one down. Fields of fire had to be cleared. An open space must be made outside the wall or the foe would simply mount from the contiguous rooftops and overrun us. Stones and timbers were recruited from the razed homes and used to reinforce the spared, which now fused beneath the mason's trowel and mortarman's hod into a rampart of bricks and rubble and timber, wicker and stone and hides, with stacked baskets of sand atop the rooves, manned by every able-bodied buck, urchin, dame, and pensioner who could scrabble up a ladder and pull it up after him. The outer suburbs were left to the foe; the town and city would be defended to the death.

The permanent walls of Athens were two: the Lykomid or Outer Wall, which embraced the full circuit of the city (but not the town), and the Half Ring, the monumental bastion protecting the Acropolis itself. Both were double walls with sallyports at intervals. At the western base of the Rock squatted a system of defense works called the
Enneapylon,
the Nine Gates. These were courtyard-type bulwarks, one behind the other; they defended the Acropolis on its least severe and most vulnerable flank, directly beneath the Three Hundred Steps. The inner wall was called the Half Ring because it enclosed only the western waist of the Rock. No battlements protected the faces east and north. These were unscalable.

The Rock itself was walled massively at the summit by those great stoneworks called “the Fortress.” Eleven towers studded this circuit, each sited to provide covering fire for the towers on its flanks. Embrasures for bowmen notched the circumference, with an additional forty-seven artillery ports, the “beaten zones” of whose drop ramps covered every quadrant by which the citadel could be assailed. Within the Rock the central cistern, the Deep Spring, captured drinking water year-round; steps ran down to it broad enough for two water bearers to pass abreast. Stockpiles of grain could hold out thirty-six months. Nor was there any shortage of stone to hurl down upon the foe, and if there were, the defenders would break apart the Rock itself to extract more. Theseus' chief of artillery, a transplanted Thracian named Olorus, estimated that with all forty-seven ports firing, gunners atop the Acropolis could dump thirty tons a minute, with a fall of between ninety and a hundred and forty feet. This was moot for the moment, however, as the city and its dwellings squatted directly in the path of such a barrage.

I had found Selene, among a unit (or “stick,” as the Amazons call them) in the suburbs south of Coele, and would call to her across the lines. It heartened me tremendously to see her, despite the malevolence of her people's designs and her own manifest enthusiasm for them. I saw that she had steeled herself against all tender feeling toward me, yet, will you believe it, I felt confident I could overcome this if given the chance. As for my own feelings, I loved her with all my heart, more even than in Amazonia. Was this madness? I knew only that the malaise that had borne me down for two years, since the expedition's return from the Amazon Sea, had dispelled like magic at the sight not only of my beloved but of the women's army entire. Life had begun again. Though I might perish defending the nation, and in fact fully expected to, I felt not downcast but exhilarated.

Selene herself was in high spirits. All the Amazons were. They were taking the suburbs block by block and leveling them. They scorned our chockablock cottages and coops. “How can you live in these pestholes?” The warrioresses would yoke a team to a lintel and send a housefront crashing. “There, now you can breathe!”

The Amazons hated every doghouse of the metropolis. While the Scyths looted for trophies and plunder, the daughters of Ares seemed bent on eradicating the city entire. They tore up paving stones and razed pediments to the nub. Nor were their depredations confined to Attica. Selene vacated for ten days, fighting at Thebes, a great battle, we heard, at Chaeronea on the river Haemon. A corps of the Titaneia lost hundreds in Thessaly, between Scotussaea and Cynoscephalai, before making off with half the prime stock of the nation. A brigade under Hippolyta and Skyleia laid waste to the Peloponnese from the Isthmus to Patrae. They captured Nisa intact, with both ports of Nisaea and Cenchreae, as well as Troezen, Sicyon, and Orchomenos, and occupied all of Corinth except its citadel, the Acrocorinth. Amazons are not looters. They care nothing for gold, slaves, or property; the only wealth they prize is horses. They had so many now that no nation of Greece could pasture them. Certainly Attica couldn't. Selene came back from Thebes with six new animals. Her string was now seventeen. Other warrioresses had even more. These must be rotated to pastures at Marathon and Thria, in cavalcades of thousands, or driven north to the plains of Boeotia in great dust-trailing herds. The Amazons dammed the Ilissus and Cephisus and turned the Eridanos, such drizzle as it produced, into a watering trough. The Haymarket they made a racetrack. They occupied all the outer boroughs now. At night their fires blanketed Market Hill and the Hills of Ares, the Nymphs, the Pnyx, and the Knights. We camped across from them on the hills of the Muses and Ardettos; we still held the Cemetery, East Melite, and the full quarter of Itoneia.

At this early stage of the siege, the bulk of Athenian companies at arms was still quartered in the town. Horses of the cavalry units were picketed on the slope south of the Museum, others before the Palladium and Ioneum. Astonishingly, the defenders' morale held high. Now that the women and children of Athens had been gotten safely across to Euboea, the men settled to their duty. A refreshing equality suffused the site, as knights and yeomen found themselves recruited to the same chores: the erection of defense works, the clearing of fields of fire, and the humping of quarry baskets of rock up the Three Hundred Steps of the Acropolis, there to be loaded onto counterweighted booms that the engineers would crane to freight the magazines that fed the citadel's artillery. The companies labored at this task in two-hour shifts, twice one day, thrice the next. Everyone worked, including the king.

One such noon, perhaps twenty days after the invasion's onset, the lady Antiope called me to attend upon her. A page brought the summons, just as I dumped my hundredweight at the summit. “Next time hail me at the bottom!”

The lad led me to the king's palace, called the Crooked House for its inclined foundation, on the south pediment of the Rock. One could not wash up. No water for that. At the lady's door a second page waited with a broom. He beat the chalk off my back and plastered my mane with oil.

The lady received me in the nursery, which was outdoors, high up, a gallery open on two sides, screened from the sun by that type of marine canopy called a topsider. The day was high summer but the space beneath the fly remained breezy and cool. A vantage gave toward Ardettos and another to the Nine Gates. Painted dolphins disported themselves across two walls; the floor was tile made to look like sand, with sea crocuses and starfish underfoot, the whole ingeniously contrived to create the illusion of treading on ocean floor, safe beneath the waves. It was a babe's room, and a delightful one.

The lady was dismissing two knights as I entered. I recognized them as horse couriers, employed by the Council of Lords as well as by the king. “Welcome, my friend of the plains! Come in, Damon. Forgive me for not sharing an hour with you before this time.”

The lady motioned me toward a child-sized bench. There was no other place to perch, save a rocking horse or a smiling-sun drum. “Don't be shy,” Antiope teased. “Court ministers have parked on that hobby colt. Besides, we are all shorn of dignity in the play attic of a child.”

I was struck as ever by the lady's beauty, and by an aspect I had never seen on her—sorrow. She seemed a figure of poignancy, speaking Greek, with her flesh made over by maternity. She sensed my perception. She asked if I remembered, from her country, the custom of the two cats.

“During the season of the Gathering, two felines, one black and one white, rule on alternate days. A woman is one person on Ulla's day and another on Narulla's.” She smiled. “I have become in your country a different cat.”

I asked what kind. I meant it lightly; to my surprise, the lady drew up with gravity. “I am no longer who I was, but not yet who I must become.”

She rose from her bench, gently detaching the babe from her breast. He was a rugged tyke. Did I wish to hold him? I demurred, citing the clumsy paws of bachelorhood.

“Do you hate me, Damon?” the lady asked of a sudden. “So many do,” she observed, “of your people and my own. Better I were dead, for the woe I have brought to both our nations.”

Antiope set the infant in the crook of my arm. Below we could hear the couriers' horses departing. Antiope crossed the toy-littered carpet and stepped out upon the gallery. I followed.

“Do you count yourself friend to Athens, Damon?”

She meant Theseus. Most emphatically, I declared.

“You sailed with him to the Amazon Sea and have taken his part in the seasons since. Do you love him?”

I stammered something.

“I do,” she swore. “More than I imagined I could love anything. More than my own people; more than this babe, flesh of my own flesh.”

She squinted down toward the Half Ring, upon whose ramparts Theseus labored, somewhere, even now.

“When I departed my country at his side, I judged him a great man. But now that I have come to know him as only a wife and friend may, I realize this estimate was far too slender. Kings before him ruled by might; he governs by restraint. Who has shown such greatness of heart? Theseus dares that which not even the gods have assayed: to elevate the race of humankind. To endow each individual with sovereignty over his own heart and to lift the state as a whole to govern itself. Every hand is against him in this, even his own nature, which loves the wild ways, as you have seen. You do not appreciate what you have here at Athens, Damon. Such a thing has never existed and, once extinguished, may never come again.

“What is new too is what has been born between this man and this woman, between my husband and me. I know it is right because so many hate it. It is the hope of the world. Yet it must fall, and I must make it fall. Do you understand, my friend?”

I did not.

“My people have come for me. I must go to them. Dead or alive, they must possess me.”