Last of the Amazons (3 page)

I begged my sister to take me with her.

“Of course you cannot go, Bones. But you may aid me if you will.”

I would! Just tell me how.

“Buy time for me. Conceal my flight. Play the warrior when they grill you. Offer nothing. Back me as Selene has backed Eleuthera.”

I knew she was duping me. I could tell as she took my shoulders in her hands and bent her gaze to mine in savage confidentiality. She was ceding me a spy's errand and passing it off as a hero's. Yet she was my sister, my champion and mentor and ideal. What option did I own but to obey her, and make my peace with being left behind?

3

HANDSOME DAMON

E
uropa's flight set the city on its ear. Within hours ships had been secured and provisioned, men recruited and officers assigned. The running-amok of a captive governess was one thing; but that a respectable maiden of good house (and one who, when she reached fifteen, would be betrothed to Prince Atticus, son of the illustrious Lykos) could be so seduced from her wits as to make off in the train of such a savage, this set the public cauldron to the boil. Whose daughter was next? Whose sister, whose wife?

Censure for Europa's flight fell upon Father, who was denounced not only for not placing a sturdier watch upon the maid (he should have known she would fly!) but for appointing a wild wench over his daughters in the first place. As for me, I came under as fierce an assault as my sire, for our offense was viewed not as a clan or tribal matter but a crime against the state, to wit, inciting an insurrection of her women. Ministers of Lykos and others came to the farm and interrogated me under oath.

Where had Selene fled?

I did not know.

Where did I think she had flown?

I could not guess.

I was arrested. Armed men tore me from my mother's skirts and bore me in a waggon into the city, where I was placed under detention at the town home of the baron Peteos, a hero of the war with the Amazons and father of Menestheus, who would one day rule the state. Such sequestration, I was informed, was for my own protection. I scorned this, until the first stones began crashing against the shutter boards.

Mother had been permitted to bring my clothes and weaving. But she too had come under suspicion. Before darkness had fallen that night, a mob surrounded the house and was only dispersed by the king's guard hastening from the palace. Nor was this corps of vigilantes constituted of men and boys, as one might expect, but women, even respectable matrons known to Mother, not to say girls my own age, some of whom had been my playmates. How they howled for our blood!

Now it is a fact that in a crisis of lawlessness, one often discovers discharge not in the law but in the outlaw. Thus it ensued that Father's brother Damon, the rogue of the family, materialized as our deliverer.

Damon was our handsome uncle, seven years Father's junior, who doted upon my sister and me, as happens frequently with bachelor kinsmen possessing no issue of their own. Damon had farmed our estate with Father up until the Great Battle with the Amazons, in which he had fought against the army of women, at first with distinction, then later, apparently, with no small notoriety. He had taken their side, at least for an interval. Athens had set a price upon his head in that season; we children could never ascertain the particulars, for as soon as one of our elders commenced to speak of the occasion, a general clearing of throats would ensue and all sprats be banished from the room.

At any event, Damon had had to decamp out the bolt hole, as the bailiffs say, making his living thereafter by piracy and the hunt. It was he, when my sister and I were small, who made us to understand Selene's shame at capture.

“You must remember, girls, that Selene in her own eyes has committed the supreme sacrilege of her race, that is, to deny to her lover Eleuthera, whose soul stood in her care due to the gravity of her wounds, the boon of a glorious death. No panel has convicted Selene; only the heart within her bosom, by which she stands self-indicted and self-condemned.”

Uncle had always favored Selene. He brought her cheeses and rare fruits from his travels; she would accept from him what she would from no other. I never saw them speak. Rather, each would take station across the court from the other, at such time as other business was being transacted and other traffickers filled the lane, so that a glance might pass between them, unremarked by strangers, yet freighted with volumes comprehensible to themselves alone.

Had Uncle been Selene's lover? He was so dashing, and she so comely, that our lasses' hearts must conjure aye. Yet never, for all our snooping, could Europa and I catch them at so much as the exchange of a word.

“Among warrior races, pride is all,” Uncle made us to understand. He told us of the flint daggers the wild tribes carry and of the rite of
autoktonia,
double suicide. “This is the act Selene was charged by the code of her race to perform when her mate Eleuthera's wounds, and her own, made capture inevitable. I was there when we took her surrender, on the mountain track between Parnes and Cithaeron. Both women's horses had been killed days past; Selene had borne her lover, near death, seeking to mount the pass at Oinoe. Each time the hill bandits of the district had spied them out, wounding Selene further, twice nearly capturing both. Some dozen of these villains had her birdlimed inside a shepherd's hut when our patrol chanced upon them.

“We drew up in wonder to behold this warrior, despite her injuries a specimen of peerless pride and beauty, arise from her covert and advance toward us, bearing her lover's unconscious form in her arms, with her own hands weaponless and extended. To take an Amazon alive was a prize unheard of, and promised such distinction that our captain, moved as well by motives of clemency, granted her appeal—to reprieve the one and enslave the other.”

That had been seventeen years ago, six years before my birth and three before my sister's.

Now, in the event of Europa's flight, Damon had returned to Athens and been welcomed. He had volunteered for the posse and indeed been elected one of its sergeants of cavalry. The squadron would embark with the dawn. Father must sail and so must Damon. But how could they? To abandon Mother and me? To leave us to the mercy of the mob?

The hour was past midnight; Uncle, Father, and Mother conferred in the chamber of our detention, while I feigned slumber on a pallet against the wall.

“There is only one solution,” Damon pronounced. “The girl must sail with us.”

He meant me. I must accompany the posse.

One may imagine the protests put up by Mother and Father. Had Damon gone mad? To take a child upon the sea! And into such peril! “Where will she be safer?” Uncle countered. “Out that door?”

For minutes Father and Mother refused to hear him. They proffered brief after brief in opposition. Each failed on its face.

“Bones must go with the ships,” Damon offered with finality. “And not under protest but with a will.”

If Mother and I sought to return home now, he attested, we would be stoned. Not this day perhaps; Theseus' guards might beat our enemies back. But in time and without fail. “The city's derangement may be wicked, but it is real and it will not go away. Only by aligning ourselves with the mob's cause—all of us—can we slip this noose.”

By now I had abandoned all pretense of slumber. So that Uncle might meet my glance and flash a hopeful spark.

“What do you say, Bones? You speak the Amazon tongue. You know your sister's ways and Selene's. In a crisis you may speak to them or for them.”

My inclusion in the posse, Damon insisted, would be no small asset on such a delicate chore. But most crucially, he stressed, the act would demonstrate to the city that our family, women as well as men, stood on the side of civil order and in opposition to chaos.

It worked. The following dawn Father, Uncle, and I joined the squadron of four
—Euploia, Theano, Herse,
and
Protagonia—
where it waited on the strand at Phaleron Bay. The tally of men at arms had been trimmed to eighty, and cavalry stalls fitted amidships, as it had been decided that the company must ferry sufficient horses to mount at least half the whole. For in that vast wasteland into which the pursuers proposed to venture, a dismounted party could neither track nor overhaul its object. Without cavalry, if our men won a victory, they could not follow it up, and if they suffered a defeat, they would be ruined utterly.

Here was how the vessels were launched. First Theseus and the priests, officiating from an altar of shingle, sacrificed a black ram to Persephone and a bull to Poseidon. The prayers were chanted and the vessels blessed, the holy cargo of myrtle and rowan plaited into the prows. Wives cast garlands of agnus-castus, sacred to Aphrodite of Navigation, and put up that hymn to the Daughters of Night, whose verses I had always thought referred to shepherds

Across Night's field

fare you safely, beneath that canopy

woven not of stars

but of our love

but now, I realized, meant sailors on the sea.

The rollers were greased and the shoring timbers whacked clear by the boatswains' mallets. The men braced up the ships with their shoulders to keep them from careening. The craft were heavy, freighted with goods for trade—oil and wine, weapons and armor, everything except the horses, which were held by their wranglers in rope pens on the strand. Now the sailors took their launching stations outboard of the gunwales, and each, planting his soles on the shingle and seating the loom end of his twelve-foot oar inboard against the centerbeam, with the shaft braced against his thole pin so that the blade extended five or six hand's-breadths beyond the gunwale, set his chest to this and heaved in unison upon the beat. The vessels groaned, prow-first, toward the sea. The false keel tracked down its trench; the rollers screamed; smoke ascended, in wisps and then clouds. When the vessels' prows had nosed into the sea far enough to float, the first eight horses were loaded aboard each, hoodwinked, up a ramp which was then taken up as well and slotted in place to form the door of the undecked stalls amidships. The last four horses, yoked as a team, joined the men in warping the ships out again (as they had nosed back into the sand, thanks to the weight of the horses) till again they were elevated, lifted by the sea. Then these last four animals were loaded too, up the short ramp, and this was set in place barring their stalls. I had been recruited with the wranglers to gentle the beasts, who now balked and bellowed in fright as the ship yawed against its hawsers and the men sprang to their benches.

How gallant these lads! How caught up in their adventure! Flown from their hearts was all recall not only of my sister Europa, the object of their enterprise, but even of Selene, whom they hunted on orders of the Assembly and the state. Did any give thought to her? Not even Father or Damon in that hour. Who knew her? Who apprehended the gods she served, or those imperatives of love or honor that commanded her?

Only I.

As I sought my berth in the foreships, out of the oarsmen's way, Selene's voice arose unsummoned within my breast. Her apparition ascended before the inner eye; I heard again her testament, which she had imparted just three nights prior to my sister and me, mandated by the foreknowledge of her own end to come.

Who would speak for Selene?

Only I.

I felt the last scrape of sand beneath the keel. I heard the hawsers' slap and the chanty, “Cast off and pull.” The ship slewed, seeking balance between her oar banks, and then her prow set toward open water. The motion caught me sick, as it did the horses, who now in alarm evacuated bowels and bladders, sending this broth in cascades onto their footing timbers and through these to the bilges.

Heaven preserve us, the ships had launched.

We were on the sea.

4

DAUGHTERS OF THE HORSE

Selene's testament:

I
was born not in Amazon country but ten days north, among the Black Scythians. These are not black-skinned, as Ethiopians, but black-maned; fierce fighters, women as well as men. My mother was Cymene, daughter of Prothoe, who had dueled Heracles hand-to-hand and been slain by him before the Typhon's Gate of Themiscyra, capital of Amazonia. Mother could speak Pelasgian and Aeolian Greek, and wished me to learn for the free people's sake, though among our race speech, and its handmaiden, reason, are considered stages of degeneration, inferior to action and example, which is the language of
Ehal
, Nature, and of God. Among my people speech is parsed; even infants babble little, rather are schooled to make themselves known as horses and hawks, without sound. It has been my disfigurement, for my race's weal, to have learned letters among civilized society. This art has severed me from God and from the free people.

Men say God made the sky. This is mistaken. God
is
the sky, for creation may not stand apart from Creator, but all that is, is, and is God. First from the sky issued the thunderbolt and the hailstorm; for a hundred times a hundred thousand winters these reigned, solitary. Then came eagle, and falcon, and all creatures of the air. These lived a thousand millennia, never touching earth, for she had not been made, but dwelt happily upon the air and within it, which itself was all their sustenance, of food and spirit. They were a part of God and were God.

Sky craved communion and brought into form Earth, our mother, charging her with his bolts of fire and cleaving her belly to bear ocean and mountains and inland sea. All these were great and holy and were a part of God and were God.

From Sky came Horse. In the beginning Horse flew, more swiftly than the eagle, and in fact was called by God “steppe eagle,” as she is to this day by the free people. Horse was first to form societies. Before Horse's coming each creature dwelt apart and solitary, in communion only with God and Earth. Horse invented language. Her tongue was holy, God's own idiom, which speaks in silence, without even the cast of an eye or flick of a mane. This language yet endures, but may be heard by humankind only within the stern clash of battle.

Hear, O People, the peal

of God's sacred tongue, resounding alone

atop Ares' anvil, hammered into hearing

by the mawl of valor.

When humankind appeared, they were weak and puny. Horse nursed them on mare's milk and blood, and raised them as her own. Horse led the clans to water when thirst parched the plains and to vales of fruit and forage when famine bore them hard. When swift fire raced across the steppe, horse commanded the people, Leap upon my back; and bore them at the gallop to safety. Horse taught them to hunt the shy hart and the wild oryx, the mountain eland and the gazelle. And when grim famine stalked the land, Horse instructed the people: Eat of my flesh and live. Without these boons and others numerous as the lamps of heaven, the race of mortals would have perished a thousand times over. Always Horse preserved them. And when the free people in thanksgiving sought to make sacrifice to God, they offered up that which they revered and venerated beyond all, their savior and ally, Mother Horse.

Horse taught the free people her ways, to ride and raid; she schooled them to bear winter's hardship and summer's travail. Her flesh she donated in every part, from the casings of her organs, with which the free people bore water, to her sinew for bowstrings, her gut to stitch wounds. From her mane the free people wove rope and winter cloaks. They used her hide and hooves and even her teeth, grinding these for beads and dyeing them into belts for their maidens' loins. The people were happy. They ranged God's estate in freedom, wanting nothing which Horse and their own hands could not provide. They would have roamed so forever, had not the gods, by their own discord, intervened.

For that race of humankind which knew not the horse dwelt in misery and abjection, scratching its living, as swine do, of acorns and the roots and grubs of the slough. Prometheus the titan took pity on them. He stole fire from heaven, when Zeus of the Thunder expelled the generation of immortals elder to himself.

Prometheus gave fire to man.

Horse feared fire. The free people fled from it as well. But those bog-bound of humankind discovered the arts by which it could be made their patron. Meat they roasted, and grain; they tamed the wild rye and barley and made these to grow at their bidding, imprisoned within their walls, and by the close flame to bake these to bread.

With fire came pride, as Prometheus (whose name means Forethought) well knew, whose object was the overthrow of heaven. And in his pride man tore the flesh of his mother, the earth, rending her with the beaked plough, to sow the seed by which he would stoke his arrogance.

Man knew speech now, and collected into towns, stinking kennels abhorred by God, where not even His holy storm may penetrate, but walls and ramparts keep it out. Man lived in hovels, reeking with smoke and sooty with ash. These made his hair smell, and the dirty rags he wore to clothe his nakedness; his hands stank with it and his skin grew ashy and abraded. The free people drew scent of these creatures and fled, as horses do, from his foul and malodorous approach.

Men's language succeeded the language of birds and horses and the silent tongue of the free people. The stem of his speech was fear, fear of God and God's mysteries. Man sought by naming things to denature them and deplete them of the terror they held for him. His words were harsh and disharmonious, and as remote from true language as the screech of bats is from the music of the stars. Yet among our captains it was recognized that those encroaching tribes as Pelasgians and Dorians, Aeolians, Hittites, and such, who coveted our lands and the herds which ranged them with us, made speech with words and employed these as weapons. So some of our race must learn their tongue to resist and confute them. In each generation a number were chosen. I hated and feared this, for God had cursed me with facility for this art, and I hid myself each time the war queen's gaze scanned among the people.

I had a friend Eleuthera (such was her name in Greek) and her I loved beyond moon and stars and breath itself. Among my race, any who displays promise as a leader may not grow to womanhood among her own, lest her mates, out of their love for her and fear of seeing her elevated apart from them, work mischief to damp her gifts. So she is sent away to allied tribes, where she is tutored in the arts of war and politics, to return only after her moon's blood. When she was ten, and I seven, Eleuthera was called to this commission. All light left my heart at this hour and when they came to me, the ministers, calling me to learn the languages of men, I resisted no longer.

I was taken out, dressed in doeskin with my hair beaded and parafinned, to the trace which runs from the Gate of Storms to the sea and along which the traders' trains pass. A war-schooled mare carrying a foal was staked out with me. The traders took me across the sea to Sinope and placed me in a proper household, under whose law I became what they call a
sinnouse,
a sort of companion to the daughters of the house, who is above a slave but beneath a sister. I learned the Greek tongue, both Aeolian and Pelasgian, to speak and spell.

The family was not unkind to me. The father offered no insult and in fact shielded me as if I were a daughter. But he would not let me ride or run, and when I reached once to touch the crescent saber mounted above the hearthstone, he slapped my hand. “No, child, this is not for you.”

I dwelt in the women's quarter, learning home craft and music, to spin and to weave. Days I studied; nights I lay apart and wept. My heart longed for home—for the sky, which was God, and the wild earth, our Mother. I missed the sweet voices of heaven which spoke in birdsong and the chirrup of the prairie marmot, the spirits of thunder and the flood and ebb of the sea of stars. When I caught scent of the stable, the horse-smell racked my soul. I ached for the Wild Lands, even their pains, for sharp stones beneath my heel, the sting in the nostrils of the frost-bound steppe, and her gifts, the warmth of my Eleuthera's arms about me in the night.

There is no word for “I” in the Amazon tongue. Nor does the term “Amazon” exist. This is a foreign invention. One says “the daughters” or, in our tongue,
tal Kyrte,
“the Free.” Eleuthera, as I said, is a Greek word; my friend's true name is Kyrte.

Among tal Kyrte, one says not “I,” but “she who speaks” or “she who answers.” To express herself, one says in preface, “This is what my heart tells me,” or “She who speaks is moved thus.” One of our race does not perceive herself as an individual apart from others, mistress of a private world divisible from the internal worlds of others. When one of my people offers speech in counsel, she does not produce this as a Greek might, from his own isolated disseverment from God; rather she summons it from that which contains her; that is, allows it to arise from that ground which has no name in our tongue but is called by the Thracians
aedor
(in Greek, “chaos”) which is the sky, which is God, that which animates all things and inhabits the spaces between things, understaying and undergirding all.

Before she speaks, one of the free people will pause, sometimes for no small interval. This the impatient Greek takes for slow-wittedness or stupidity. It is neither; rather a distinct and disparate manner of viewing the world.

In Sinope when I heard people use the word “I,” I experienced it as a thing of evil, recognizing its wickedness at once. Even after I learned the hang of it, and came to use it myself, I hated it and felt it a bane which would consume me if I kept its usage too long.

The term of my indenture was defined in this manner. When the mare (whose worth was my tuition, so to say) foaled, and that foal grew to saddle age, I might school it and ride it home. I could not wait for this, however, but stole another horse and weapons. I fled home, believing I could put this “I” behind me. But it had sunk its malign roots into my heart and contaminated me, that I might never truly return to the Daughters, not as I had once been, at one with them.

When one of tal Kyrte misses steppe and sky, she longs not just for their beauty but also their cruelty. For among the free people the foreawareness of one's death, and heaven's indifference to it, is the keenest and most brilliant pleasure, rendering all precious. This is the supreme mystery, the fact of existence itself, before which mortals may only stand in silence.

The city people hated and feared this mystery. Against it they had founded their walls and battlements, not so much to repel invaders of flesh as to hold at bay this unknown, to blot it from their hearing and wipe it from their sight.

This is why they hate tal Kyrte, the free people. Our existence recalls to them that before which they have flown in terror. If we can live with it, in fact live
in
it, then they must be less than we, to have erected such edifices to its exclusion. That is why they hate us and why they came, Heracles first and then Theseus, to destroy us.

Once in Sinope I saw the great Heracles. He was old then, past forty, with his famous Labors behind him, but still brilliant. The whole city tramped out to see him.

The bards praise Heracles as the solitary hero who plundered our queen Hippolyta's virgin belt. This is a lie. He came to the Wild Lands with twenty-two ships and a thousand men at arms—and not such clods as one sees with stone-point spears dull as billhooks, but iron-armed, in cuirasses of tin and silver, shields bronze-faced and heavy as waggon wheels, and helmets of electrum and gold.

They wished to see him wrestle, did the people of Sinope, and set the prize of a bronze cauldron for any standing past the count of ten, and a talent of silver for him who took the great man off his feet. You could see Heracles cared little for such sport, bored of it long since, but he still threw with such violence all who dared close with him that levity departed the tourney, and wives feared for their husbands, lest this son of Zeus snap their spines, not knowing, even so far past his prime, his own strength.

I trailed him afterward through the streets, compassed as he was by his corps of toadies and tufthunters. His strength, one perceived, was not of men but of gods; you could believe he had slain the Nemean lion bare-handed, whose skin he yet wore, so dense was the pack of muscle across his shoulders and so massive the columns of his thighs. Yet what struck my child's observation was not Heracles' might but his sorrow.

He was not free, nor had been ever, but a vessel formed (and deformed) of heaven. God had bequeathed him glory imperishable, a berth among the stars, and charged him to overturn the order of the world. This, Heracles had done. He had performed his labors.

I studied his eyes, in the glimpses one could catch between the press of idolaters. Once I thought his gaze met mine. Did he know me for the race to which I belonged? I believe he did, and at once.