Author: Steven Pressfield
Category: Nonfiction
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“If Eleuthera lies now near death in the Amazon homeland,” my sister spoke, “and Selene has flown to aid her, then I must go too. To preserve her if I can! I would gladly die beside her, or for her.”
None but a younger sister knows the thralldom in which she stands to her elder. It rubbed even harder with Europa, for she was such a prodigy as rider and runner, fastest of our district, boys included, and possessed of the wildest heart and keenest wit. Now she was a woman, set to launch upon the most brilliant of adventures, while I, her mealy brat sister, must not only wither at home, bereft of her and Selene, but act out the pretense of ignorance to all who would quiz me later. I feared too for my dear sister. She was just a girl! I loved and hated and envied her all in the same breath.
Europa saw it. She drew me to her. “You must second me now, Bones, as Selene seconded Eleuthera. Do you remember the story?”
Indeed. Selene had told it a hundred times; we begged for it, my sister and I, never tiring of its recitation.
Selene’s elder mate of the triple bond called trikona was that Eleuthera whose life she had preserved by the sacrifice of her own liberty in the aftermath of the Great Battle of Athens. At the time of this childhood chronicle however (the one my sister referred to), Eleuthera was fourteen, Selene eleven—the same ages Europa and I were now—in the homeland of the Lycasteian Amazons, on the Wild Lands north of the Black Sea. Amazons may not renounce their virginity until they have taken the lives of three foes in battle. At that time Eleuthera had claimed one and bore his scalp on a rawhide thong at her waist. This night of which Selene spoke, a raid had been made by two hundred, Eleuthera’s clan and others, upon a party of Phrygian freebooters encroaching on their country. Eleuthera, emerging from the fray at a hard gallop to that defile where Selene and the other novices too young to fight waited holding the second string of horses, had skittered across the plain (it was winter, the earth iron-hard) calling to her younger mate to vault and ride; victory was theirs and no pursuit. Mount and follow me!
Selene had sprung to the back of Eleuthera’s two-horse, whom she had just finished “running off” to get him his second wind, and heeling him with all her strength had barely held her elder in sight, with such joy did Eleuthera’s primary mount, a big long-legged gelding called Soup Bones, bear her across the frost. At last reining-in, Eleuthera had permitted Selene to draw alongside and, stretching her lance moonward, held out upon its shaft two scalps of men, slick with blood and the still-steaming flesh of the crowns from which they had been torn. Eleuthera here howled such a cry of joy, Selene told my sister and me, as made the down of her arms stand up stiff as boar’s bristles.
“Now by the laws I may take a man between my thighs,” Eleuthera had cried, laughing. “But I shall not. Never! But make these my children”—she elevated the scalps—“and by them, and all that follow, preserve the free people!”
This was Eleuthera’s warrior oath. My sister had imbibed the tale a hundred times, for she would beg to hear it, untiring, and Selene never denied her. I devoured it too, wondering at the manner by which our governess imparted it, ever the same, so that we came, Europa and I, to recite entire passages. My sister’s soul drank the song as a horse hard-ridden sucks water from a forest pool, and Selene, perceiving and approving, enlisted her whole heart in consummating our conspiracy. She drew Europa to her, and me, inflecting the tale with her touch as well. As she told of Eleuthera’s horse, we felt her knees press our flanks; her fingers played across our shoulders as hoof strikes on the steppe; she kissed us and flattened our breasts against hers so that the smell of her hair and the heat of her flesh reinforced the tale and became indivisible from it. She became Eleuthera to us, and as she, Selene, had surrendered in love to that warrior maid whose name means Freedom, so Europa and I fell in love with her.
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
Europa’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 consider
ed 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.