Author: Steven Pressfield
Category: Nonfiction
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An Amazon referred to herself now in the third person. Selene had become Mela, “Black,” and painted her face, breasts, and shoulders with a substance made from elk grease, chalk, and charcoal. If you addressed her as Selene, she did not hear, nor could you call her “Black” in the first person, but must put it in the third: “Will Black answer a question?” “Is Black hungry?” Speech, of which the Amazons had never been prodigal, was now cut near to nothing. The women conversed by signs, and these curt and warlike.
Among our Athenians, numbers began to ape the women, binding their curls in aboriginal fashion, even scarifying their flesh. It became necessary for Theseus to forbid such barbaric practice and, when several defied him, to make examples of them.
Late on the fourth day, the corps came upon paunch fires of horseflesh. The foe no longer hunted but butchered the beasts he drove. He knew fear and stepped up his pace. Amazon foreriders shot ahead, no longer in twos and threes but platoons, and not novices but grown warriors.
Elias and I rode ahead too, with Philippus and others under Prince Peteos. We pressed on till dark, alternately trotting afoot and riding. We had long since lost sight of the Amazon foreriders. Our mounts were worn to a nub; they must rest and be watered. We came upon a dry wash and scooped sand till the muddy wallow showed.
From the rear came a lass of the Amazons. She reined at a distance, uncertain if we were enemy. We waved and shouted in Greek. From her throat ascended a cry of woe. She elevated her lance, pointing north as to some theater of horror, then wheeled and spurred in that direction.
With the dawn our horses could travel. We followed the girl’s trail. Our party was still ahead of the main body; their dust could be seen eight or nine miles to the rear. The lass’s prints led over a rise. We crested it to a bend in a dry course, backed against chalk bluffs. Such a scene spread before our vision as to brand itself in recall, unspeakable and ineradicable.
At first it seemed only that a great fire had scourged the basin, as if burned-down cookfires had been abandoned, pocking the earth. Then one realized that each pit had been a person. Each had been a young girl.
We dismounted, at no officer’s order but impelled by horror. On foot the doughtiest advanced. One sought to look away, yet the ghastliness compelled him. Beneath the bluffs, horses had been slaughtered, disemboweled and decapitated. These were arranged in a ring, fifty-seven in all, when they were counted later. Before each were the incinerated flesh and bones of a girl. Every one had been beheaded. In the center, crucified upside down upon two crossed timbers, hung the corpse of a lass. Her skull too had been taken. Such desecrations of person as bear no profit to recount had been perpetrated upon her flesh, as no doubt they had before their immolation, on that of all the others.
This was Aella, Little Whirlwind, trikona-mate of Eleuthera and Selene, the courier who had made a prize of the prairie hen.
The girls’ bones had been pounded into the chalk by the hooves of their murderers’ horses, then the mass spaded up and heaped in piles, the remains of each confounded with all others. The arena entire was scored with foot strikes and slathered with evil-looking signs and symbols.
The corps of Amazonia arrived not long after. As in all columns the forward elements appeared first, then the main body, company by company. Each time the same drama was enacted. The warriors broke into a wailing. Grief overwhelmed them. They did not know what to do. In anguish braves sliced off pieces of their ears and incised gashes in their legs; others seized sharp stones and beat their flesh or scooped ashes and heaped them upon their heads and shoulders. Numbers ran off into the washes, where they simply spun in wild woe, while yet more writhed upon the earth or beat their elbows and knees into the stony bluffs. I saw one warrioress race up a face and fling herself down. The plunge must have been forty feet; across its fall, rocks flayed her flesh; again and again she performed this flagellation, uttering such cries as even to hear became unendurable.
With each increment of daylight receding, fresh companies arrived and made discovery of the holocaust; these too broke down, appending their ululations to the general dirge. Some drove arrow points through the flesh of their palms; others scored their scalps with knives; the blood of grief matted their hair and sheeted down their brows. They carved their horses as well, lancing the flesh and cropping manes and tails. Throughout, such a plaint of lamentation arose as may not be described. Across the scene warriors by hundreds writhed in affliction, their flesh painted with their own blood, onto which the chalky dust of the site adhered, rendering them, as darkness descended, wraiths of horror. At one juncture I came upon Selene, blood-masked beneath lacerations of her scalp. In her eyes I saw no person or even a beast but a force of nature, as impervious to reason as fire.
At dark Eleuthera appeared. Aella had been her novice, junior of her third trikona. As Eleuthera rode in, others of the corps made to take the corpse down. At once they broke off. Eleuthera advanced to the gibbet and reined in at its side. There she remained all night.
It was explained to us later that the Scyths had offered such outrage to the persons of these girls as to take not just their hair and heads, that the souls might not enter the life beyond, but had confounded the bones of their corpses so that their shades might not even be reconstituted in the afterlife but must exist, sundered and particularized, in some unspeakable netherworld of despair.
All night the requiem kept up. The most extravagant of Greek rituals were as nothing beside it. Its excess was appalling. I could not endure it. I found my brother and Philippus. We rode onto the plain, until the pitch of the mourning and its exorbitance abated enough to be borne.
Another rider could be seen, solitary beneath the moon.
This was Theseus.
He recognized us and motioned us to him. We drew rein alongside. “They are invoking Hate,” he said.
At first I did not understand. Then, turning toward the precinct of grief, I apprehended an alteration in its tenor. The Amazons summoned Hecate now, and Nemesis and Aidos, Daughters of Night, and Artemis Void of Mercy. We could hear the “elelele” they put up. Their prayers ascended to gods and goddesses unknown, to Phrygian Cybele, Great Mother, Womb of Creation; to Demeter and to Black Persephone, Mistress of Hell. As these wails ascended, a correspondent anthem broke from the wilderness beyond: wolves in their packs, bloodcurdling and primordial.
“What do you think of this, brothers?” the lord of Athens inquired in a voice dry as the chalk of the plain. We turned toward him. Theseus’ features appeared gray beneath the moon and animated by such a cast of woe as I have never conjured before or since. He elevated his crop, gesturing back toward the theater of blood.
“Here is how one lived,” Theseus observed, “a thousand centuries gone.”
17
MASSACRE AT THE
PARCHED HILLS
The Tanais is a great river, the boundary between Europe and Asia. Its breadth at the nearest ford, the one Borges and the Scyths must flee to, is six hundred yards. Here the Amazons would fall upon their enemy. Here they would exact their vengeance. The sequence of events went like this:
Two hours before dawn the corpse of the child Aella was taken down from its scaffold and burned. The bones were painted with ochre and swathed in the wolf-skin pallet that had bound Eleuthera’s war bundle, that kit of tokens and amulets which constitutes a warrior’s holiest and most potent possession, and laid out upon a stand of chalk elevated calf-high above the plain. Fifty-seven such biers had been erected, one for the ashes of each maid, as best as such could be determined. Atop each packet an axe of battle had been laid. Around the ring, horses and riders formed up, painted death colors. One Amazon stood at the head of each pyre, enacting the office of priestess. All affect had been drained from the corps by the nightlong riot, replaced by such resolution as transcended hunger and exhaustion. That fearsome emotion that animates the female in all-female groups (called outere in Amazon and gynekophoitos in Greek) could be felt now, palpable as the predawn
chill. Before each crypt a platoon of warrioresses advanced, single file, and drew rein. As each rider came up, the priestess elevated the axe, whetted to a razor’s keenness, and split the tip of her mounted comrade’s tongue. This was the Invocation of Ares, the “iron rite” that few males had ever witnessed, by which each warrioress tastes the salt of her own death, so that no enemy may claim he drew first blood.
Blood to iron,
Iron to blood.
Two further scorings were incised upon each cheek, while the corps chanted a hymn of such antiquity, Selene later confirmed for me, that not even she understood the whole. The bundles of burned bones were rolled within their wolf-skin packs and stowed in the waggons of the auxiliary. The priestesses mounted, joining the company. The brigade ascended from the wash and formed up on line, awaiting the sun.
Now the first scouts returned. They reported an axle-split waggon of the Scyths fifteen miles on, abandoned where it had broken down. This was sign that the foe was in full flight. More foreriders appeared. Dust had been sighted ten miles beyond the junked waggon, fifteen from the Tanais. The war council convened, from which all Athenians were excluded save Theseus and Lykos. If orders were passed, I never heard them. I fell in beside Selene, and, as no one made move to repulse me, stayed.
The sun is to the Amazons what the Muses are to the Greeks. He who sees all and recalls all. In silence each warrioress now prayed to Him, that He witness her valor on this day and remember it for the free people for all time. The instant the first beam cut the skyline, the brigade broke into that yip-yip ululation that makes the hair stand up all over a man’s body. Selene shot forward beside me. A thousand yards across, the line whooped and catapulted into motion. I spurred my mount and hung on for dear life.
When Amazons advance in force anticipating battle, they employ the trikonai, the bands of three, in the following fashion: the foremost companies, those first to set out, are constituted of the eldest of the third triple, riding her secondary warhorse while trailing her primary and advancing at the best speed she can make without jading the mounts. The elder novices comprise the succeeding element, each on her own horse leading the main of her champion’s string at a modified pace. Last to kick off are the most junior, trailing the remainder at a yet more abated gait.
The Tanais was forty miles ahead, a day’s ride across that broken country. The Amazons aimed to cross it in a morning. The corps made speed into the ascending sun, at such a hard canter as had the snot sluicing from my nostrils like water. On the steppe one never pisses; every drop you drink passes out in sweat and spit.
By midmorning the brigade had passed the abandoned Scythian waggon and covered six or seven miles beyond. Here was a cold stream; a halt was ordered, as even the primary battle mounts, carrying nothing, had gone fagged. We would never overtake Borges by midday. The second string caught up; the corps got fresh (or fresher) horses under them. The line kicked off again.
Noon came. The river was within ten miles. We could see Borges’ dust clearly now. The line of advance broke into columns as each rider dodged rises and breaks, seeking the smartest path. Amazon captains transited, holding the eager bucks from the canter. I stuck with Selene and a platoon of about thirty. The steppe was dry grassland, chest-high on the horses. Suddenly a brave galloped across the front, calling out a word I did not recognize and pointing with her lance into the postnoon wind toward the clouds of dust raised by Borges and the herds seven or eight miles ahead.
At once alarmed cries pealed down the front. Amazons stood on their horses’ backs, full height at the trot, squinting ahead. Whatever her comrades had seen, Selene saw it too. She whistled rearward to alert the novices. “What has happened?” I called.
“Follow me!” Selene cried and laid the quirt to Daybreak with more violence than I had ever seen. I turned back to the front.
Flames.
Borges had set the dry grass afire.
The Amazons thundered north, perpendicular to the line of pursuit. I called to Selene, declaring the corps’ agitation excessive. I was congratulating myself on my cool head. Then I looked back.
The fire’s front, which had been a smudge ten heartbeats earlier, had doubled in breadth and vaulted a mile closer. I turned for Selene; she was half a furlong gone. When I looked again the blaze had redoubled.
A tributary of the Tanais twined back, six or seven miles north. This was what Selene and her mates were running for. Fresh horses might have made it. Mounting out of a wash, my Knothole buckled into the clayey face; he keeled so slowly I was able to step off, as from a boat to a dock. The conflagration roared behind. You could smell it now and hear it.
Other mounts had played out beneath their riders; now their comrades came back for them. I saw Hippolyta, at past sixty more vigorous than the bucks. To my astonishment Selene wheeled in above me. She had come back for me.
A mile east the fire had got ahead of us. We were cut off. With five or six others, Selene and I plunged into a wash. Half a foot of water stood in a silty pool. The captain Alcippe, Powerful Mare, ordered all to dig in, which we did with fingers, knees, and toes, burrowing furiously into the bank, that the blaze might pass over. The Amazons had got their mounts prone, laying their bodies across the horses’ necks to hold them down. With both hands the women slathered muck on themselves and their animals. Cloaks and buckskins they tarred with mud, to mantle their own heads and those of their mounts.
The fireball passed over like this. First came a wind, not from the direction of the blaze but opposite. It was not hot but cool. This was air at ground level being drafted into the fire by its greed for combustion. In moments this mounted to a gale. Selene and I had our breasts pressed together, with sludged buckskins over our heads and a pocket of muddy air between. “Do what I do!” she shouted. She meant breathe through the buckskin, to keep out the fire. The wind built to a pitch, scouring plain and wash, then cut abruptly. The lull lasted moments; then the gale resumed, roaring skyward. One felt his breath sucked out as by a blacksmith’s bellows. Our cowls went dry in instants, then heated like parchment to ignition. From our foxhole I peered back to the pool of the wash; in moments the earth was seared to ceramic.
The heat hit. Sound vanished. One entered a vortex. To say one held his breath would be fantastic. Nothing could hold. Your guts down to your asshole were sucked up and out, and when you gasped for air, flame flooded in instead. Selene clung to me. We were lifted bodily with the horses beneath us. The gale dashed us like dolls. I came to myself amid a cyclone of soot. Something was whipping me. It was Selene, tearing at my cloak. This was afire. She slung it to the earth, every yard of which was charred and smoking. I heard Alcippe’s voice crying, “Rise!” Somehow we did.
The fireball had passed; through eyes gummed to slits we could see its hinter wall sweeping northward. In its wake soot tornadoes churned; before our feet spread a wasteland of ash and smoke; we clutched at each other, just to know we were still alive, and spread our stances to keep from being bowled over in the aftergales. The horses rose and the company hauled them by their draglines up onto the flat in the direction from which the conflagration had come. Every inch of dirt was sizzling. One trod as on a griddle. My footgear was ox-hide, thick as a thumb; the heat scorched through as if it were tissue. The Amazons peeled the hide of their leggings to make boots for their horses. As far as sight could carry, the plain smoked like an anvil. We had to get off. The heat drove us.
The captain Alcippe commanded. We must learn the fate of the main body, she declared, those that had gotten away toward the tributary. Two riders were dispatched to report our condition and find us again with orders. Meanwhile our party would make all speed toward the Tanais and the foe.
Cries came from the soup. Hippolyta’s band materialized, charred to a crisp but still eager for action; our troop fell in with them. Across the cinderland this outfit trudged, perhaps forty in all, men, girls, older warriors. The sun could not be seen, so dense was the canopy of smoke and ash, not even a
glimmer to get one’s bearings by. But the horses knew. They knew where the water was. I glanced at Selene and her comrades; without a word all were roused to exploit the smokescreen, to close on the foe from the quarter he could least anticipate. I set one sole before the other, purblind and suffocating. A mile passed. Two. From the smoke arose a waggon of the Scyths. An arm of the fire must have turned back on it. The rig was charcoal, including its women and children. Nothing remained of the oxen but the cages of their ribs and their skulls with the great horns, pitched forward onto the earth.
We heard a whistle; more riders broke from the murk to the west. Amazons coming up from the rear. Within minutes three companies had materialized, reinforcements who had set out from the Mound City a day after the main body and whipped their mounts to a lather when they saw the smoke. These were tribes of the White Mountains, under the war leaders Adrasteia, “Inescapable”; Enyo, “Warlike”; and Deino, “Terrible,” who had arrived tardy at the Gathering on account of an oracle. The novices of our own brigade followed as well. Fresh horses. In moments our party had enlarged from two score to two thousand, superbly mounted and armed to the eyeballs. The reinforcing companies had discovered the scene of slaughter at the bluffs. Every woman’s blood was up. They were painted and ravenous for revenge.
Meanwhile the main body of the Amazons, the companies who had bolted north fleeing the fire, had managed to escape by means of an upper fork. They had crossed this, raced east, and swum the Tanais at a deep ford north of the one Borges was fleeing for. In other words, they had gotten ahead of him, though still a distance to his north. They were laboring south right now, on the opposite bank of the Tanais, driving themselves and their exhausted horses to beat Borges to the ford. Their numbers including novices were eight hundred, all mounted archers.