Author: Steven Pressfield
Category: Nonfiction
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Atticus, Father, and the captains worked forward through the press of men. The pilot Leon, whose spark had ignited the find, grinned up from halfway down the steps. He held a flint and horn charm, an aestival such as Selene had hung on our camphor tree the night before she made her break.
“This trash was looped at the brow of the bung, Cap’n. What d’you make of it?”
Father recounted the charm’s significance. It was Damon, however, and four others chosen by lot (beans from a shaken helmet) who entered the crevice. The ingress was so close-fitting they could not scrape through in armor, but must shed all body plate save shields, rolled after them through the slot, and javelins to be used as spears, as the eight-footer was useless in such a strait, and the bow as well. Down they went. The remainder of the outfit clustered about the inlet, hallooing for reports as they descended. I begged Father and Atticus to let me accompany the party; my size would let me slither where grown men could not, and I could both speak the Amazon tongue and read its sign. Father would not hear of it. “Damon will reckon all you can and more. Find a seat and practice silence.”
Here, then, is Damon’s account of this descent to the Underworld, as I many times heard him retell it, both in that hour and in subsequent seasons.
Damon’s tale:
I was picked because I had some of the Amazon lingo, and was well known to Selene, should we butt into her. Then too, if the lass Europa were indeed down this dungeon and repented her recklessness, it’d serve her to parley with me, her kin. I suffer the phobia of close spaces, but there was nothing for it. Wedge down we must.
The party was five: two brothers called Ironhead and Colt, both peerless horsemen—a lot of good that would do down this rat hole; Phormion, called Ant for his strength, who wanted no part but proved doughtiest of all; and my cousin Io’s boy, Mandrocles, a lad of great courage but who couldn’t swim. You’ll see how this figures soon enough.
We wriggled down. The first twenty feet was close, but we could stand; daylight still filtered in. Ant took the lead and called back what was coming. It got tighter. We had to crab sidewise, then stoop; after that it was all fours, like miners; then belly-down like a snake. We spooled a rope marked in feet. At a hundred Ant balked. “This hole’s going nowhere, Sar’nt.” He was so close ahead I could touch the soles of his feet but fear made him shout. I poked him on. The shaft must lead somewhere or there wouldn’t be steps at the entrance. “This ain’t the mouth, Sar’nt, it’s the asshole.”
Ant crabbed on, nursing a lighted taper. “A cavern, mates!” We spilled like turds onto a sand flat before a lake of bitumen, a bowshot across. A gallery rose thirty feet above us. There was a tar beach, wide enough for two score to stand. I ordered all to hold, not to foul any spoor. The lake was tar, thick as broth. Little falls of naphtha cascaded into it. Glyphs painted the walls, not animals or men but spirals and rosettes, magic signs.
“Is this the Underworld, sir?”
“Yes, and I’m the Hound of Hell.”
Sandal treads showed in the torch flare. A woman and a girl. You tell a print’s freshness by edges fallen in. But in the tar the walls held sharp as if carved in stone.
“Could be ten days or ten minutes.”
They had been here, Selene and Europa, that seemed certain. Who else would wriggle into this hellhole?
“Did they cross the lake, sir?” Ant asked.
“They didn’t fly,” answered Colt.
“Then do we have to cross too?”
I ordered all to scan the walls for sign.
“Amazon!”
Mandrocles cried this, making all jump from their skins. But he was only playing for the echo. His mates cursed him and laughed as men will with relief from fright. The oldest was twenty-two. They began spooking each other for fun, fancying beasts in the bowels of the lake.
“How deep, you reckon?”
“Step in and find out.”
Then: a sound.
“What was that?”
From across the lake.
“Sounded like a horse.”
“You’re cracked!”
“Like hooves on stone.”
All listened, breathless.
“If it is a horse,” Colt offered, “it’s a hell of a sprat, eking through that crack we just crabbed through!”
None dared voice the obvious: the cavern might have another entrance. Across the lake.
I called Selene’s name.
No answer.
Again, identifying myself: “Selene, do you have Europa?”
Nothing. I ordered the men to hold their torches clear of the surface and follow across the lake. I probed in calf-deep, waist-deep; then the bottom dropped away. Ant followed, then Colt; the others were too scared to stay behind. We swam, shields propelled like skiffs before us, javelins and brands atop. Mandrocles clung to Ironhead, dog-paddling. The distance must have been a hundred feet. We came out soaked in tar to our beards. The smoke from our torches smudged the ceiling. Suddenly winged harpies thundered by the thousands. Bats. The men plunged in terror as the flock shrieked from the vault. It took eternities, it seemed, to recover breath. The banshees had fled deeper into the cave—or toward an egress we had yet to discover.
“Have a look ahead, Colt.”
“What, alone?”
“Give it a squint.”
“You’re the sar’nt, Sar’nt. You go.”
“I am the sergeant. And I’m telling you to go.”
We groped on, along curtains of stalactite. A scream. Colt’s brand had lit his oil-soaked beard. We pressed about him, beating out the bushy smudge. Ahead plunged a manhole.
“I ain’t going down there, Sar’nt.”
I led down a shaft steep as a stairwell, then along sandhills of some extinct river. I had expected bones or crypts, but there was nothing. Just walls and galleries, spooky with the drizzling of unseen cataracts.
“It’s far enough, Sar’nt,” pronounced Ant.
He wanted to call it a camp. Let our mates from above carry on.
“We’re not here to bivouac, Ant.”
Ironhead repeated that we’d pushed far enough; more must reinforce us. Colt seconded this. We had done our bit; let our comrades take it from here. Of a sudden Colt shuddered and lurched, as if shoved from behind. His speech choked off; he looked down, fingers reaching to his chest.
From his breast jutted the warhead of an arrow.
“I’ve been shot,” he said casually, as if remarking the passage of a cloud. Blood burbled from his nose and over his lip. I heard Ironhead bawling in anguish behind me. I reached to haul Colt clear (for it was certain a second shaft would materialize instantly) but he dropped so fast my arms couldn’t catch him. He fell as only the dead fall, unstrung at every limb.
With a cry his brother dived to his side. I confess I thought of neither; it was Ant who, maintaining sense, covered his grief-mad mate with his shield. At once a second shaft thundered into the oak-and-ox-hide chassis. I had recovered my own wits enough to reckon the direction of the attack; I seized Ironhead by the hair, as he still cared for naught but his brother, whom he sought to reanimate, as the horror-stricken often will, simply by the intensity of his grief. Ant and I hauled him behind a face of rock. All had dropped their brands, which lay on the oil ooze, setting it to blue flame.
“Goddess and ye Princes of Hell!” a female voice cried in Greek. “Take this, the first!”
From Selene’s throat arose that war cry of Amazonia which turns men’s spines to squash, echoing and reechoing about the cavern.
What of our valor, you ask? Not a jot remained. We began screaming, myself not least, as if our cries could carry back up to our companions still in daylight. Help! Help!
Selene was above us, somewhere in the dark. Boulders plummeted from the galleries. The very roof of the sepulchre seemed to sunder.
“Come forward, two!” Selene cried in Greek. “And two go free.”
She meant she needed three heads to appease the Lords o
f the Underworld; she had one in Colt. Each of us wheeled to the others, ready to take the deal if we thought we’d be among the pair to skate free. Shame sobered us. Without speech, all knew what we must do: rise and run for it.
“I’m not leaving my brother,” Ironhead swore.
His whisper carried like a shout.
“Rise and join him!” A third shaft ripped the ooze.
“Europa!” I cried into the black. “Are you there, child?”
No reply. This made me certain she was to hand, ordered mum by Selene. God help us if the lass drew down on us too. We snatched the brands; Ironhead and I grabbed the heels of our dead mate; we elevated shields and bolted. Along the dry river and up the staircase chimney, Ant took the lead. We tore down the tunnel leading to the lake. We could hear Selene’s tread above us, sprinting along the gallery down which the bats had fled. Colt’s corpse we dragged like a sack of onions, skull banging on the stone.
The lake shone black, dead ahead. Selene had gotten around us. From the shelf above, stone after stone plunged; from there one woman could pin us all day. We must break past, and hell take the hindmost.
Out we hurtled, flinging ourselves shields-first into the lagoon. I heard my cousin’s boy, Mandrocles, that cry which follows being hit. Ironhead and I still hauled Colt’s corpse. The lad Mandrocles had been struck by a boulder; half his face had been staved. He could not swim. Terror seized him; he wheeled for the inward shore, that ledge we had just stepped from. Stones the size of melons crashed around us. I seized the lad and shouted into his face: “You can’t go back! She’ll kill you!” He sunk his teeth into my hand. I let go with a howl. He clawed for the inboard shore.
At this instant Selene broke forth. I saw her vault from the gallery above, an axe in one hand, a brand in the other. She slung the torch. The lake erupted.
She had lit the soup.
The surface-slick of naphtha roared to flame. I plunged below. Fear wrung my breath; I dumped shield and lance and catapulted to the surface. The first sight was the hair of my arms incinerating. I heard, rather than felt, my beard catch fire. The lake was aflame. Instinct taught my arms to sweep before me; for an instant I could breathe, then the surface reignited. Something tore through my shoulder: an arrow shaft bound the joint. I felt no pain, only vexation. Selene was above on the shore.
She fired point-blank. I felt the flesh of my neck tear as the warhead ripped beneath my ear. I swam with the strength of terror. Ant dragged me onto the far shore. I turned back and saw Selene, on the hellward bank, dragging Mandrocles’ spent form from the fire. She lifted him by the hair and hacked him off at the neck. The Amazon raised his dripping, flaming head impaled upon her axe and howled a cry of such savage joy as only could be loosed here, at the gates of perdition.
Into the asshole tunnel we wormed, Ant first, then me, then Ironhead. Cries came from above, our comrades at the cavern’s mouth. One had snaked down, threading a rope. It was my brother Elias. Ant sought to pass the line to me. It jammed. “Grab my feet!” he commanded. I obeyed, calling the same to Ironhead behind. Now from the latter’s throat arose such a cry as may never from memory’s vault be eradicated.
“She’s got me!” Ironhead bawled. His grip clamped my ankle like a fetter. He was being drawn back, out of the tunnel. Such shrieks rose from his gorge as to turn blood to water. Later, when the parties went down to collect the corpses, Ironhead’s was found thus: Selene had caught his ankles at the bung-end of the burrow (she had apparently swum the lake of fire) and wrapped them with her star belt, the plaited rawhide band her horsewomen’s race wear about their waists. She had set her heels against the stone and pulled Ironhead out, hacking him off first at the knees, then at the waist, then at the neck. The head she kept. We never found it.
7
EUROPA
Mother Bones:
Thus Uncle’s recital. It requires scant imagination to conjure the state of his comrades remaining aboveground throughout this ordeal, compelled to endure first the cries of those trapped beneath the earth, themselves powerless to bear them succor, then to scent the black asphaltine smoke, ascending first in wisps, then pouring in clouds from the upper stone, followed by yet more grievous dirges of anguish, resounding close within the cavern’s mouth; while our own agents plunged to aid their fellows, and at last the ghastly aspects of the survivors, two only of five, as the earth spit them forth at our feet. Uncle could walk. He escaped with burns, a gash in the neck, and a shaft through the shoulder, while Ant, astonishingly, clambered clear with no wound at all. The graver toll was internal, that horror occasioned (as Damon told us later) by any duel with warriors of Amazonia, so unnatural and even monstrous does it strike the senses of men to encounter in the female such ferocity and want of mercy.
On the second morn the men found my sister on a shelf of rock some hundred feet above the tunnel mouth. Her wrists had been bound with rawhide, one ankle wedged into a cleft so deeply that the stone had to be split with mawls to crack her free. She appeared emaciated and could not be made to speak. Her horse, Redhead, remained at her side, untethered, having endured the full furlough from Athens, apparently, above twenty days, on drink and rations as meager as her rider’s.
Into such a state was Father cast, to behold his darling borne into camp in such extremity, as I feared would part him from his reason. He took up station at Europa’s side; nothing could tear him from her. From the burns of her flesh and the tar gummed in her hair, it was plain she had been with Selene in the Underworld. Had she too launched darts upon our men? From intervals of lucidity this much could be gleaned: she had indeed tracked Selene from Attica and overtaken her on this site. Selene had repulsed her, however, ordering her home. My sister would report no more, nor take food or be touched by any save me, and that only after much crooning and gentling. When I looked in her eyes I could not find her.
Where was Selene? No longer beneath the earth, told the swamp people. They had seen her emerge on horseback, immediately after the melee, from an entrance to the grotto unknown to us. She had fled north, they reported. Three skulls clattered from the wale about her waist.
Our party may not resume pursuit without interring the bones of its comrades. Yet the men could not be induced to descend again to that sepulchre of horror. Prince Atticus himself led a picked team, but at the lake of bitumen the resolve of all save the commander failed, and when he sent two back with orders to dispatch others in their stead, none above the earth would obey. Of what account is fear of hell, when hell itself yawns in your face?
At the third evening my sister began to rave. Spasms racked her frame; she writhed as one in labor and men gave back, fearing hell spawn. Only Father, Damon, and Atticus owned the bowels to kneel at her shoulder.
Fresh evils struck the camp. Toads, black toads, infiltrated by the thousands. Their filmy eyes bugged from the slime; they toppled into one’s stew and squished beneath his tread. A fellow woke to find his cloak freighted with their myriads; a hundred times a day men flung the loathsome vermin from their flesh. And all the while my sister wailed.
Now the swamp people exacted vengeance for our trespass. Before, they had feared the squadron’s numbers. Now they smelled our terror and it made them bold.
They staked a ditch across the single track out of the bog and erected a palisade to defend it. This rampart they manned in hundreds, launching their darts upon the probing parties of our company. Atticus ordered the capture of one of the swampers, that we might parley. But a man could not hang on to these creatures. Their rat-skin mantles came apart in his fist, leaving him clamping a garment so fetid he flung it in revulsion to the earth, where it melted, it seemed, into the muck upon whose surface its owner made away, lithe as a waterbug.
The gnomes commenced to snipe. Their weapon was the bow, diminutive as a child’s, with which they shot arrows slender as reeds, whose prick upon the skin could barely be felt yet whose barbs worked in with wicked art. The punctures swelled and suppurated, inducing fever, nause
a, and convulsions.
Atticus offered our tormentors a ship, horses, gold. Any token of penance the foe required, he would donate to the Womb Goddess, if they would only let us free. But they had grown insolent, these mire denizens, and negotiated nothing. They penetrated the perimeter at will, setting poison stakes beneath the ooze and pricking men, as they slept, with venom-tipped darts.
Now my sister came to herself. She would not heed Father or Uncle or me, but bespoke Prince Atticus directly. Following her, a party located the hidden adit to the cavern and entering there discovered the remains of our comrades. How dolorous arose that pyre upon which their bones were made to ash!
Europa reckoned the company’s predicament and pronounced that we must break out this night or die. Such was the authority of her conviction, reinforced in the men’s minds by the scourging they had endured at Selene’s hands, that none dared disbelieve. She was given oil with which to bathe, and men uncommanded stood sentry. When her curls could not be governed, tangled from her ordeal, she called for an edge and hacked them off.
Camp had been struck when she returned. What could not be carried was torched where it lay. The party would make to the ships, impelled by dread lest these be already taken. Uncle would send my sister and me home as soon as we got clear.
Europa defied him. She would strike north on her own now, she declared, and hell take all the company.
Father revolted. “You are a child and I your master. By Zeus, you will obey me!”
Europa gestured to the Underworld. “I have treated with the Goddess. Only through me will any leave this place alive.”
We must fashion broadboots, Europa directed the men, to trek the mire and shield our soles from poisoned stakes beneath. Two by two we must flee, shields lapped fore and aft, with hide mantles sheathing arms and legs, for every thorn might bear us venom. Further, we must proceed in silence, lest the Goddess hear, and not cry out at the fight, though death wring us by the throat.