Author: Steven Pressfield
Category: Nonfiction
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Let the next invading heroes come, be they Heracles’ sons, or any army of champions seeking to emulate him. Not armor of adamant, nor the ramparts of hell itself, would preserve them.
Time passed and they did come, led by Theseus, prince of Athens.
I had not been born to daylight in Heracles’ prime. This time, for Theseus a generation later, I was present and grown. Eleuthera was there too. She was twenty-two and a wing commander; I nineteen and her lover and friend.
BOOK TWO
THE RIVER OF
HELL
5
PHALANXES OF IRON
Mother Bones:
Within the forepeak of a ship, where the beam of the cutwater seats into the head timber of the keelson, is a cramped kennel used for the stowage of sails. It is called the wreath locker because into this space the priests, at embarkation, lade the holy boughs of myrtle and rowan, an offering to Poseidon and the daughters of Proteus.
In peril on the salt waste
Turn ye home again to these,
Lest you lose your way.
It was to this closet that I repaired when the posse launched in pursuit of Selene.
No female is welcome aboard ship; her presence is considered unlucky. And though Father and Damon spared no exertion to moderate my disquiet, and no other offered overt insult, yet I could find no congenial berth. I hid. The locker was cozy; it smelled sweet from the scrubbed linen and wreaths of myrtle. I tucked into a ball within the folds of the sails and sought solace in slumber.
The ships as I said were four, Theano, Euploia, Herse, and Protagonia. They were undecked “fifties,” reconfigured to hold six double horse stalls amidships. Oarsmen were thirty-four, with a captain of infantry, two wranglers and a cavalry sergeant, a ship’s master and his steersman. All took their turn at oars, even Prince Atticus, who commanded the armada entire.
Passage to the Amazon homeland would take sixty days. The squadron would traverse waters no Greek save Jason, Heracles, and Theseus himself a generation prior had ever sailed, at such a remove from civilization, men feared, that Zeus Himself was unknown, but such savage races ruled as knew neither manners nor law nor deference to heaven.
Indeed I hid. The usages of the sea were alien to a child, and repellent. I was sick. I could keep nothing down. Ashore each night I yet felt the lurch and yaw of the main. I huddled in a fleece at Father’s side, wretched as a trussed sow. How I missed home and Mother! How I longed for my snug little bunk and solid earth beneath my tread. The fourth day out I had this dream:
I was home, trapped by mischance in Mother’s closet. She came swiftly, responding to my cries, and commenced beating at the door to free the latch. I was so relieved! I blinked awake, eager to rush into her arms. But it was no storeroom door against which my cheek was pressed, but the sodden timbers of the ship’s keelson, and no mother’s palm hammering but the tempest-driven sea. The ship pitched and slewed. I was sick again and cramping in my guts. A gale had got up. Through the deck I could see the sail drawing full. I sought to escape again to slumber. When I next came to, the sea’s concussion had redoubled.
The ship was bucking now. Sky had gone the color of lead; squall-driven torrents lashed the deck. The sail was brailed up to quarters, then eighths. Clewed to a patch no bigger than a pot holder, it drove the ship like a courser. The heavens went black; cold rose off the deep. By God, the storm had struck fast! Only moments earlier the ship had raced on a high line; now she plummeted to trenches and canyons. Salt summits arose on all quarters. I gaped out upon mountains the color of iron.
I was puking again. I set both palms upon the futtock timbers and braced against the heave. How could this crate of spars stand such a pounding? A crewman reeled from topside into the locker. “Father Almighty”—I could see his breath shoot like steam—“spare me for my bride and babe!”
A dire keening cut my kennel. These were the forestays, singing in the gale. Suddenly they snapped, with the concussion of a bullwhip; the sail tore loose and, moments later, mast and yard vanished into the storm. At home Selene had schooled my sister and me to feel contempt for death, and this had seemed a fine idea on dry land. Now on the main my flesh revolted. Fear screamed from every sinew. My tongue was ash; my limbs quaked as if palsied. But the harder I struggled to be brave, the more terror-stricken I became. Father! I burned to burst from my hiding place and, crying his name, rush into his arms. Then I glimpsed him, on his feet amidships, as the ship dove into yet another trough. He had seized a man of the crew and driven him to his bench. I saw Father shout into the fellow’s teeth, a cry of such rage as I had never imagined him capable. He shoved the man down and thrust an oar into his fists. The ship careered wildly now, not only fore and aft but up and down, and side to side. Two men grappled the steering oar, useless now in such steep seas. The poor horses! They had long since been driven from their feet. On knees and flanks they lowed like cattle.
The storm was on us now. The universe had contracted to a disk of iron-colored deep no broader than a bowshot. We had lost all sign of the other ships. On one side, seas ascended; on the other they crashed and withdrew. One sea mounted at a time, its mass obscuring sight and sound of its successors, and with it the ship must duel one-on-one, employing all her skill and courage, while she readied for the next and the next after that. Sea succeeded sea, each resounding with malevolence, each different from the sea before. One became a connoisseur of seas. Those which rose gradually, solid at the crest, were the easiest. Into their faces the ship pulls bows-on, aligning her keel with the axis of their advance. Those seas with shoulders may be slipped at the low point, but invariably at their backs arise greater seas and steeper, transversely driven, so that crest becomes shoulder and shoulder crest in such immediate alternation that the men at oars must often haul and back water in successive strokes, the oarsmen’s task rendered diabolical by the press of the gale which twists and wrenches at their blades, seeking to wrest them from their grip.
Again and again seas rose. At last ascended the One. I could see it coming. It mounted and mounted and, when I thought it could mount no more, mounted again. I could not believe a sea could be so tall. Twice the height of a mast, if we had still had a mast, and broad as a castle, it loomed like a fortress and crashed like a battlement of stone. Thwarts snapped down the vessel’s length; men were swept from their benches like dolls. Salt sea frothed to the gunwales; the weight drove the ship under. Men were crying, soundless, amid the thunder.
Over she heeled, so nigh vertical that a man could reach out with his finger and trace his name in the wall of water. Then she rose. Tons emptied over her rails; the vessel righted, yawing violently onto the opposite beam. I saw two horses, yoked head to tail, spill over the gunwale as casually as a comb of honey at the lip of a wine bowl. The beasts did not even bob, but plummeted like lumps of lead. Seamen beholding this gaped, waxen as ghosts.
The ship righted. Men clawed and swam to their places. So many thwarts had been staved as rendered half the oarsmen benchless. Worse, their wreck had ruptured the integrity of the hull. I heard a ghastly sound and realized it was the timbers warping. You could sight down the gunwale and watch it bow like a celery stalk. The hempen girdles, the hypozomata that bound the exterior of the hull, were now all which held the ship from disintegrating. I could not believe the sound as they warped and torqued. Strips of timber began shredding from the hull. Planks and carlings tore past, gale-driven. I saw one strike a fellow as he labored to set a beam; the blow sheared his ear and half his scalp clean as a cleaver. The man did not even notice until the blood, streaming horizontally in the gale, painted a swath before his eyes.
His need drew me from my covert. I waded to him, hip-deep in the seas which swamped the ship. But the prow behind me plunged in the afterpass of a sea; I spilled down the cataract, fetching up against the sail locker, upon which I remained impaled by the weight of water. The man saw me. Such a cast illumined his eye as wrought my terror to yet greater epitomes. For he seem
ed to descry my apparition not as one of this life perceiving another, but as one already dead to her first beheld upon the other side.
Uncle appeared beside me. He clutched me to him, shouting something I could not hear. Suddenly a hand seized his shoulder. It was Father. Before I could speak, he had wound a line about my waist and, binding this to his own, bawled to Damon that both must resume their benches. Father hauled himself—and me, yoked to him—to a shattered thwart and there, reseating his oar, set back to labor.
How excruciating that toil! Hour succeeded hour. Men’s frames racked and broke. The horses’ suffering surpassed description. The walls of their stalls had long since been splintered, yet the beasts themselves remained roped in place, not only hobbled fore and aft, but tethered to the footing timbers of their stalls. As each sea passed over, their heads and necks were driven under. Such horror: to see their hooves only, thrashing above the seas. Then the ship rights herself and the beasts, in whose goggling eyes terror finds no more eloquent depiction, heave up into God’s air, manes and forelocks running rivers, to gasp the salvation that may endure only another breath.
I peered into the faces of the men at oars. Rivers of brine sluiced from their beards. Their long hair stood sideways with rime shooting from it. Into a trough the ship plummets; for a heartbeat the cosmos becomes pacific. Then that sound ascends and the ship, rising, shoots anew into that maelstrom which not all the howls of hell may replicate. My own hair, snapping like a pennant, became bound about the oar against which I too pulled, with palms riven to pulp, beside the bulwark of my father. How valiantly he labored! Nor did he toil alone, but all up and down the benches men strove with as much resolution and as little hope. I was seized with compassion for these gallant, luckless men. How brave they were! How nobly they persisted into the teeth of doom!
Last of terror’s stages, Selene had tutored Europa and me, is busyness. This succeeded now. Men simply had no time to fear. Each instant arose freighted with so many exigencies that fear could no longer shoulder in. How insignificant one felt! I beheld Father and Uncle, the bastions of my universe, and knew both as but stalks within the maw of the Almighty. I spoke into Father’s ear, as casually as if he and I sat at ease upon a bench at home.
“Selene has not fled to the Amazon homeland, Father, but to Hell’s River in Magnesia. Europa will have followed her there, seeking to overhaul her.”
How did I know this? Perhaps a god whispered. Yet I knew, certain as my own death.
Father’s eyes never lit on me, bound as all to Atticus and our pilot. Yet he heard and believed.
The men rowed and rowed.
How long the trial endured I cannot say, save that at last, when I swooned into the lap of my father, the men yet maintained their resolve, until, the tempest’s fury at last abating, the vessels sighted haven and rushed toward her to embrace their reprieve.
6
A TRANSIT TO THE UNDERWORLD
The companies trekked to Hell’s River by tens, with me yoked to my father by a rein of rawhide, that I might not bolt at bogeys ascending from the mire, or, if I tumbled into one of the bogs of the approach, be roped to safety. It was raining. Chill sheets drenched the parties, turning the track to slough.
Sixteen days had elapsed since the squadron’s deliverance. It had taken that term for the four ships to reacquire one another, each having fetched up on a different shore, and, once reunited, to refit the vessels, see to the wounded and lost, and to permit horses and men interval to recover. As early as the second night, Atticus and the officers had interrogated me.
What intelligence had I imparted to Father about Hell’s River? Had Selene indeed fled there and not to the Amazon homeland? Why would she do this—and how did I know?
I recalled to the officers that the incitement for Selene’s flight had been the report, conveyed to her by Theseus on the noon of his visit to our farm, that her lover Eleuthera stood now in peril of her life, somewhere in the Wild Lands above the Black Sea.
“Amazons bond in threes,” I heard my voice address the captains, “and believe that hell will accept any one of this trikona in the stead of another.”
“What does this mean, child?” Prince Atticus pressed gently.
“I cannot know for certain, sir, but common sense tells that Selene will make first for some portal of the Underworld and there offer sacrifice, perhaps of her own life, beseeching the gods to spare her mate Eleuthera’s.”
A second council was held that night, and a third when all four ships had at last reunited. A number of speakers confirmed the existence of such sites as I had suggested, where the tributaries of the River Styx—Acheron, Cocytus, Aornis, Lethe, and Phlegethon—twine in their circuit beneath the earth.
The nearest, at Raria on the Magnesian coast, was Fire River. This was the one I had been inspired to cite and the one for which plain sense argued the most compellingly. Its entrance lay within ten days’ ride of Athens. It could be reached entirely by land, requiring no sea crossing (since Amazons fear and despise the salt element). And it was the only one on Selene’s likely track, that is, to the ultimate destination of her homeland.
At the twelfth dawn, then, the patched flotilla put back to sea, retraversing the expanse across which the storm had driven it, to beach three days subsequent on that strand of shingle called the Hollows, in Magnesia, again on the mainland. A party of twenty was detailed to guard the ships, while the main body, fifty or more under arms, commenced the tramp inland seeking the portal to the Underworld.
This proved a desultory shuffle, as several among the crew who had personal acquaintance of the site had reported that “Fire River,” so daunting in its appellation, was nothing more than a subterranean sump void of supernatural substance, a tarry trickle stinking of sulphur and bitumen. The stench was so foul, these fellows recounted, that neither bird nor beast inhabited the region but only lizards, serpents, and slugs.
The belt Father had cinched about my waist was of a type whose usage he had acquired in Amazonia twenty years previous, on the original voyage under Theseus. The Amazons call it an astereia, a “star belt,” and the Greeks a riding wale. Selene wore such a wale always, for, as all horsewomen know, nothing comes in handier in the company of fractious mounts than a good length of rope, as lead, halter, hobble, or lasso.
So tethered, I advanced in Father’s train. A stink ascended from the ooze, vile as eggs gone rotten. Men packed their nostrils with moss and bound muffles about their faces.
There was no village and the only locals, a runt race calling themselves Rarians, “Womb People,” over whose greased topknots even I towered, spoke a form of shore Pelasgian so antique than not even our mates from Brauron or Marathon could savvy it. Heaven knows how these beggars made their living; perhaps they rustled lizards or swamp cats for the hides. Their fingers were no greater than my toes, and the stunted limbs from which these nubs protruded appeared more like the paws of some species of nocturnal rodent than the extremities of God-spawned humankind. Their mantles were of rat skin and opossum with the heads and tails still on, while both male and female ran naked from the waist down. Their loins they smeared with particolored mud, perhaps for its protective shell, or, as Prince Atticus reckoned, they were just plain dirty. Coin or gold meant nothing to them, but they would jig with glee over any artifact of fired clay. They coveted drinking cups, which our men carried strung to packs and belts, and would offer any tale for one. Yes, they had seen an Amazon. Make that ten, or a hundred! A young girl, indeed! Of roan hair, wasn’t she, or did we say raven? Three times these denizens directed our companies to the Portals of Persephone, the debouchment from the Underworld (they claimed) of the River of Hell, each sortie revealing a less illustrious backwater than the one before.
At one point Damon achieved a parley with their headman. “These wart bastards worship the Womb Goddess” was his report to Atticus and the captains. “We’re trespassers. They won’t steer us near the cleft, bet on it, and may strike a ruckus if we stumbl
e too close. Here’s more to chew on. Every swamp breed I’ve heard of are master poisoners. These may tip their arrows, or paint thorns, even set sharpened stakes for us to tread upon.”
The posse slogged on all morning. The country was asphaltine swamp, into whose ooze the men’s tread sank to the ankles. What elevations there were rose only inches above the mire; vegetation was canebrake and deerwood, whose stalks, dense as the shafts in a quiver, could not be prized apart but must be hacked through with the bronze axe, while a canopy enforced a stoop upon even the runtiest. Beneath this vault the natives of the marsh glided with ease; they tracked us, so close you could hear their sparrowlike gibberish, while our party thrashed in mounting vexation. Men hung their footgear round their necks and slogged on, while leeches fastened to their crotches and armpits. The companies, at last breaking through to an eminence, rallied upon a shelf in the lee of a face, attempting to fire stalks of sodden pulp for warmth. Father wrapped a fleece about my shoulders and trundled to take counsel with the commanders.
I leaned against the cliff, out of the rain. The morning’s labor had drained what little hope I yet held for this site. Of all the self-advertised Rivers of Hell, if in fact such a site was Selene’s object, who was to say this was the one to which she had made, or that Europa had believed so and followed—and what made us think that either of them was still here? Such were my ruminations, when a cry came from the men on the shelf.
They were jigging and hooting, pointing to the rock at their feet. A trickle of flame meandered within the cracks. This was naphtha. Dragon’s blood, the men called it, though a child could see it was but some naturally occurring form of flammable liquid bitumen. The men called for Atticus and the officers. I scooted forward to hear.
At the brink of a bluff a flammable trickle spooled netherward, self-extinguishing into a natural well five feet across and twenty in depth. Steps had been carved in the funnel, looking ancient as Cronos. At the base could be distinguished crude glyphs. A cleft led into the earth, such as a man might squeeze through sideways, and whose terminus, if there was one, could not be made out.