Author: Steven Pressfield
Category: Nonfiction
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Borges didn’t know this. Neither did the brigade I trekked with. Our leaders broke into the open a mile or so west of the river, thinking we were the only ones left alive. Ahead Borges and his Scyths drove the herds into the ford. The total must have made four thousand head, with a quarter already in the crossing. We could see the Scyths’ whips and the flash of their “flies” in the sun.
The Amazons under Hippolyta, Alcippe, Adrasteia, Enyo, and Deino deployed into a thousand-yard front. The elder spurred to the fore on her big grey, Frostbite, her leopard-skin shield somehow intact through the conflagration, with her iron-colored plait falling down her back. From its sheath she snatched the labrys, the double axe sacred to Zeus, Hurler of the Thunderbolt. Hippolyta elevated the weapon before her, blade and spike extending toward Borges’ Scyths, the river, and the horses.
“Sisters! Take back what is yours!”
I had never witnessed a charge of massed cavalry before, and certainly not one constituted of riders of such prowess, mounted on such stock. The Scyths themselves were magnificent specimens, warriors whose command of the steppe stood unchallenged across a thousand leagues. Yet these bolted in flight before the Amazons had closed within half a mile. My position was near the fore, trailing the captain Alcippe, who advanced, as the entire corps, at a hard canter. The Amazons, responding to no command I could detect, formed on the fly into that front that comprises the famous “crescent charge.” One felt the outere, the wildness of females in all-female groups, crackle between them like heat lightning. At this stage they still held their mounts in check, conserving them for the final burst.
Here came Selene alongside me. “Keep from the foe!” she commanded, indicating the mass of the Scyths now plunging into the ford. “These are not for you.” I could see her scalping knife strapped to her thigh. Her pony lengthened stride; in an instant she had shot clear. A tide of hooves and hindquarters surged in her train. I strained to glimpse the Scyths. This was impossible for the clouds raised by the Amazon horses’ passage, not to say the hoof-slewed clods and divots which beat about me in such density that I had to seat my face like a jockey into my animal’s flying mane, and even then the broadside nearly bowled me from my seat. The corps of Amazonia thundered ahead. I have never heard a sound of such power or felt the earth shudder with such violence. And above all, that war cry which turns men’s bowels to liquid.
You could see the river now, the actual crossing, which had been obscured from the plain by lines of alder and sycamore. It seemed leagues across. There was an islet at midchannel; in its shallows, horses in the hundreds milled, abandoned by their drovers. The Scyths had hauled their waggons over first, to preserve the women and children; the van of these could be seen laboring up the far bank. The main of the horsemen, above seven hundred, surged into the jam at midchannel, parting the milling herd with whips and rods and the flats of their great iron slashing swords. On the near shore, stranded parties of the foe rallied into a defensive front. They were overturning their waggons to form a palisade. They slew the oxen right in the traces, hacking their necks through, to add the beasts’ bulk to the rampart.
Now the Amazons shot to the gallop. Across the front one saw rider after rider release her reins, clamping only the slack ends in her teeth while she filled her left fist with the great horn-and-ash bow, containing as well three secondary arrows, fletched ends skyward; from the belt-mounted quiver drew that foremost shaft, whose warhead she had honed to razor keenness and whose death-seeking flight she had dedicated to Ares, Hecate Dark Moon, and Artemis Void of Mercy. Far ahead I glimpsed Selene and the captain Alcippe. At Hippolyta’s side they plunged among the foe. When I reached the site nothing remained but mounds of flesh and armor and Amazons straddling them, slicing scalps. The river frothed with Borges’ corps in flight.
In the accounts which have been circulated of this battle, and the songs by which it has been made known, the substance is that the Scyths were overhauled and massacred at midriver. This is not how it happened. The slaughter took place beneath the cut banks of the far shore, where the foe in his hundreds sought to mount the bluffs into the teeth of the Amazon blocking force. The women had got ahead of them. The companies commanded by Antiope, Eleuthera, Skyleia, and Stratonike, those which had swum the Tanais via the upper ford, now made their appearance, thundering into position atop the river bluffs. I was at midchannel, my poor Knothole having played out utterly, where I drew up into the shallows of the islet. Here is what I saw:
Across two fifths of a mile of bluff, the warrioresses of Amazonia massed on horseback and afoot, blocking Borges’ flight. The Scyths bunched up in the eddies below. From above, the Amazons loosed volleys of shafts and darts, point-blank and by hundreds. The enemy returned fire with bows and lances, maces and pikes and slung axes. They fought with whips and bare hands. At some sites the cut banks held the foe ten and fifteen feet below the Amazons. Here they were being slaughtered like fish. At others, where the bluff stood less sheer, companies of the Scyths sought to mount and duel face-to-face. The broadsides of the women beat them back. Steed after steed of the Scyths upended and foundered, pitching rearward upon their mates.
Now Hippolyta’s two thousand closed on the foe from the rear. Breast-deep in the channel, this corps rained iron on Borges’ eleven hundred trapped beneath the banks, while from above Antiope’s battalions slung shafts and bolts without letup. Missile after missile beat upon the Scythian cohorts. Above the cries of men and horses, one could hear the thwocking concussion of shaft piercing flesh and the metallic ping as warheads caromed off armor and shield. One saw men shot five, ten, fifteen times; their chests, arms, and legs bristled with shafts, yet still they struggled.
Into this melee the daughters of tal Kyrte plunged, driven by outere and lyssa. Not content to offer slaughter at a remove, they dismounted and pressed upon the foe hand to hand, with axe and saber, spear and thrusting sword, fashioning a front that extended, helmet to helmet, shield to shield, across nearly half a mile. The whole thing looked like some colossal frieze of marble: the twined forms of horses, women, and men, pressed so proximately upon one another that the observer could not tell where one warrior’s limbs left off and another’s began; individuals conjoined into one seamless mass, depicting by their postures every aspect of strife imaginable. Nowhere on the field could cowardice be descried, but both sides, dying and dealing death, contended with fathomless valor. I saw Theseus, blood-slathered, and Antiope and Eleuthera, insatiate of slaughter, as the poets say. Both women scoured the field for Borges, seeking the trophy of his head. It seemed none of the foe could escape the pound into which he had been driven. But the river had been in spate only days before, it turned out, such that a fresh channel had been gouged downcourse, where the banks were not so steep, and in the initial scrimmage a number of the enemy had gotten clear, with their women and children, into the ravine country on the far bank known as the Parched Hills. Borges apparently was among them.
I got across. Theseus was calling for cessation. I looked to the warrioresses of Amazonia. These resided in such a state as I had never seen beings of human kind. Led by Antiope and Eleuthera they wheeled, seeking Borges’ fleeing waggons. The Amazons were after the skulls of their daughters, which the Scyths had taken as trophies to ring the barrow they would raise over the corpse of their prince Arsaces.
There is a trace between cliffs, there at the Parched Hills, along which, I was told later, the sheep and goat traders trek their flocks in season. On this track the Amazons overtook their quarry. The women’s numbers were three thousand; the surviving Scyths a tenth of that. The warrioresses fell on the column as it bunched up entering a defile. They slaughtered the rear guard of male defenders, who stood with spectacular valor, then overran the body of the column as it massed in terror midway through the strait.
Borges had fled, marooning his dependents. The Amazons ran these down on horseback, slaying men, boys, and women indiscriminately, taking scalps or simply decapitating all who fell w
ithin their grasp. Theseus and the Athenians reined-in amid the carnage, requiring no injunction to contain their fury, so appalled were they by the extravagance of the slaughter, while the Amazons, at first in blood madness, then coolly, unhurriedly hunted down the last living thing. They butchered every beast of the foe, even his draft mules and pack animals, hacking their necks through with the pelekus, so that the blood pocked the earth in pools and the parched dirt drank it.
I saw Amazons, gore-mantled and so exhausted they could no longer ride or even lift the axe, yet staggering among the baggage train, dragging forth children and even infants, which they stuck like pigs, disemboweling even the girls and bathing in their blood. But what horrified one most was the mien of these maids as they enacted their evisceration. They were cheerful. No other term may tell it. One was stricken mute at their capacity for horror.
At the junction of two ravines was a sinkhole. Across this, some half dozen of Antiope’s cohort had strung the hide cover of a Scythian waggon, four-cornered, so that the midpoint, pending of its own weight, formed a sort of tub or vat. Above this a rude gibbet had been erected. Upon it, women and children of the foe were being strung up and gutted. Their blood spilled in great sluicing gushes, like hogs meathooked in a farmyard, while the yet-living victims cried to their gods and bawled for mercy. When I came upon this, the pool stood calf-deep.
The Amazons had found the skulls of their children among the baggage train. Within the bath of blood they laved now the bones of their daughters. This was the justice they had come for. As I looked on from atop my mount, too horror-stricken to turn away, a youth of the Scyths burst from hiding and fled toward me, crying for clemency; before I could bend, he was snatched apart and scalped, so swiftly I thought his head had been pared off, by a silent black-maned warrioress who then hauled him to the bath of blood to be drained of his fluids.
Everything was red. Not a stone of the ravine, it seemed, had escaped its slathering. Even the canyon walls were painted with the prints of hands and the sole marks of those butchered while attempting to flee. At the center of this theater stood Antiope, an axe in one hand, the severed head of a Scyth in the other. Blood painted both her legs to the hip; fluids dripped from the blades of her pelekus; her hair and even her teeth showed black with clotted gore.
Straight to her face advanced the Athenian Lykos, and it must be said that it took no slender spirit for him to do so, such was the light of slaughter in the Amazon’s eyes.
“What do you call this, thou savage!” The prince gestured to the broth irrigating the walls and floors of the canyon. “Are these ‘God’s footsteps’? Is this the ‘path of holiness’ in which your race treads?”
Theseus hastened forward, reining-in at his countryman’s shoulder.
“This is not war,” Lykos bellowed to Antiope. “It is butchery!”
Theseus sought to speak, as if to offer extenuation for the actions of the Amazons. Lykos cut him off with a curse. “You cannot defend the indefensible!”
The prince spurred off, leaving Antiope and Theseus alone at the epicenter of the massacre. The Amazon met Theseus’ eye. Such horror stood graven upon his features at this spectacle of barbarity that she, perceiving, came to herself, surfacing, it seemed, from that primordial state into which her warrior’s heart had descended. In Theseus’ aspect she read this indictment: “Savages.”
Behind Antiope, a paean broke from the corps of Amazonia.
Now it is done, now it is done
Look, all, and behold it
Now it is done.
The Amazons bayed now, a cry which was not the hymning of humankind but the howling of beasts. Antiope peered at her sisters and beheld herself in their reflection. Her stricken glance returned to Theseus. The Amazon sought, it was clear, to summon some defense or grounds of extenuation; to make appeal to him, by sign or idiom, that his verdict was excessive. No speech came. Only, from behind and in compass of her, that ungodly wail.
Night had descended and with him his daughters, Hecate of the Dark Moon; Nemesis, “Righteous Retribution”; and Aidos, “Shame,” to whom the Amazons shrilled as wolves. Theseus read in Antiope’s aspect the grief of this awareness. He sought, one could see, not to impose judgment but to exonerate her heart, absolve it somehow, out of his love, not so much for her as a woman, though this was abundant, but as a fellow regent, lord of a people, who so vividly desired that events had transpired otherwise, yet who knew, as Antiope did, that as commander she alone bore responsibility.
At this moment, as Amazon and Athenian stood across from one another, monarch to monarch, a cry broke from beneath a waggon, where, somehow undetected, a girl-child of the Scyths had survived. From this covert the maid dashed like a hare, seeking a slope too steep for mount and rider to scale in pursuit. The lass did not know the Amazon horse. Three warriors flew in her train, running her down in moments. The first snatched the child at a dead run and, upending her bodily with a cry of joy that ascended alongside the wailing of the dirge, cleaved the babe’s skull with her axe.
BOOK SIX
THE RAPE OF
ANTIOPE
18
THE OVERTHROW
OF ANTIOPE
Selene’s testament:
It is common belief that Eleuthera came to be called Molpadia, “Death Song,” subsequent to the siege at Athens. This is not true. It was the Scyths who gave her this name following the massacre at the Parched Hills. It came about like this:
In the immediate aftermath the victors galloped back to the Tanais, where the corpses of the main force of the foe, those who had been slain in the river fight, lay tangled by hundreds in the shallows.
We wanted their scalps.
I myself may testify to the elation of the hour. Here awaited our prizes, which we had won by the valor of our arms and which we coveted for our glory, each and all, that none be accounted less than her deserts, and, for myself, to display before Damon and claim him as my lover. Only the unconventional nature of the fight, that is, the urgency of breaking off to overhaul those of the foe in flight with the bones of our daughters, had conspired to swindle us of the moment for proper prize-taking. It was time to make this up. In a body the corps swept back to the river.
Among the tribes of the plains dread of water eclipses all other terrors, and in this aversion no nation exceeds the Scyths: they abhor lakes and the sea, and will not even bathe, fearing that the liquid conducts apart their aedor, their soul. To perish in a river as these foe had, and then lose their scalps, as we intended, was desecration upon desecration. Tal Kyrte burned to inflict this.
But at the bluffs Antiope hauled the corps up. She held the battalions at the brink, and there ranged horseback before the line, exhorting her countrywomen to turn apart and leave the bodies undespoiled. “Enough!” she cried. “We have exacted vengeance sufficient!”
Outrage greeted this. Indignation howled along the line. Why should we not claim these prizes, which Ares Manslayer has granted us? Heaven has exalted us with this victory! It is sacrilege to spurn God’s grant! In fact our intent, merely to carve the hair from these bags of guts, exhibits excessive forbearance, for the Scyths, had they gained the day, would have visited unholy desecration upon our flesh, as they had on that of our maidens.
I was at the left of the line. I could no longer hear Antiope, who ranged now at the center. But her intent was clear from her posture, galloping across the front with her axe of war held horizontally above her head: Hold back! Do not enter the river!
From the brigade broke Eleuthera. I was too far away to hear the rebuke she addressed, first to Antiope, then to the squadrons as a whole. I saw her surge forward, breasting Antiope’s mount with her own, then bolt past with a cry, down the bank and into the river.
As one the corps followed. I too churned down, the hooves of my pony ploughing furrows in the slope, already ground to muck by the foe in his doom. We fell upon the prizes indiscriminately—for how could one tell which had been hers?—each seizing th
at number she knew she had won.
Tal Kyrte has a word, anoxe, which has no equivalent in Greek. It denotes that overthrow which occurs in a wolfpack when the leader fails to make his kill, or in a pride when a lioness hesitates on the hunt. The monarch’s fall is instantaneous and irreversible.
This fate Antiope had now brought upon herself. She had offered outrage against God’s primal decree: Clemency may never be proffered to the foe. To do so violates Ehal, holy Nature, in whose lexicon the word quarter finds no citation. Doubly infamous, such an act was netome, thing of evil, for clearly its expression was the fruit of our lady’s corruption by the Greeks and her consorting with Theseus. In one instant she was finished, and the whole nation knew it.
That night when camp had been made and the brigade had assembled sated with glory, to Eleuthera was awarded the prize of valor. Not only for her deeds in the fight but for her overturning of Antiope’s mad summons of leniency for the foe. Two dawns later, when the kinsmen of the Scythians arrived to reclaim the corpses of their fallen and beheld the spectacle that Eleuthera’s hate had prepared for them, they out of their bereavement bestowed upon her that title by which she came ever after to be known: Molpadia, “Hymn of Slaughter.”
Among warrior nations, supreme honors may never be accorded by one’s own people but only by enemies. To receive such a name, and from so warlike a race, catapulted Eleuthera to the firmament. Her perduring state as anandros, unpossessed by man, reinforced her stature as an icon of implacability for all foes of the people. Nor was it lost on me, even then, that the elevation of my friend would redound spectacularly to my own prestige. I was drunk with the glory of our triumph. By our might of arms, tal Kyrte had requited the iniquity of our foes and, by bathing the bones of our children in the blood of those who had offered them outrage, had reconstituted their persons for the life beyond.