Last of the Amazons by Steven Pressfield Read Free Book Online

Theseus, to destroy us.
    Once in Sinope I saw the great Heracles. He was old then, past forty, with his famous Labors behind him, but still brilliant. The whole city tramped out to see him.
    The bards praise Heracles as the solitary hero who plundered our queen Hippolyta’s virgin belt. This is a lie. He came to the Wild Lands with twenty-two ships and a thousand men at arms—and not such clods as one sees with stone-point spears dull as billhooks, but iron-armed, in cuirasses of tin and silver, shields bronze-faced and heavy as waggon wheels, and helmets of electrum and gold.
    They wished to see him wrestle, did the people of Sinope, and set the prize of a bronze cauldron for any standing past the count of ten, and a talent of silver for him who took the great man off his feet. You could see Heracles cared little for such sport, bored of it long since, but he still threw with such violence all who dared close with him that levity departed the tourney, and wives feared for their husbands, lest this son of Zeus snap their spines, not knowing, even so far past his prime, his own strength.
    I trailed him afterward through the streets, compassed as he was by his corps of toadies and tufthunters. His strength, one perceived, was not of men but of gods; you could believe he had slain the Nemean lion bare-handed, whose skin he yet wore, so dense was the pack of muscle across his shoulders and so massive the columns of his thighs. Yet what struck my child’s observation was not Heracles’ might but his sorrow.
    He was not free, nor had been ever, but a vessel formed (and deformed) of heaven. God had bequeathed him glory imperishable, a berth among the stars, and charged him to overturn the order of the world. This, Heracles had done. He had performed his labors.
    I studied his eyes, in the glimpses one could catch between the press of idolaters. Once I thought his gaze met mine. Did he know me for the race to which I belonged? I believe he did, and at once.
    He had defeated us, and others would follow, seeking to emulate his glory. Yet his aspect spoke now, I perceived, of grief and contrition.
I performed my Father’s bidding,
Heracles’ eyes seemed to tell mine, begging their remission.
I had no choice.
    Heracles, as the world knows, had come to the Amazon Sea twenty years earlier, first of the southern races to bear arms against the free people. He came with thirty companies of infantry and five of cavalry and encamped before the Typhon’s Gate of Themiscyra. This was at the rising of Arcturus, when the clans of the daughters of Ares gather from as far as Libya, and, declaring he had been sent by King Eurystheus of Mycenae to bring home our queen Hippolyta’s virgin girdle, tantamount to demanding her submission to him as a concubine or whore, he called out to single combat any and all champions of the free people.
    Hippolyta reckoned at once the evil borne by this man and the woe it foretold for the nation. But the young bloods could not see past the outrage he offered. They clamored, these daughters, to be first to face him. Hippolyta commanded forbearance. She would deflect Heracles’ purpose. She would deny him the fight he had come for.
    Hippolyta stripped her girdle and offered it in peace, appending tokens of respect, honoring the invader’s enterprise and lineage as child of Zeus. Heracles accepted with gratitude, to his credit grasping the purpose of this device and wishing, since he had achieved his aim, to depart without bloodshed.
    But Melanippe, “Black Mare,” who held that year the post of war queen, and Alcippe, “Powerful Mare,” her commander of cavalry, could not bear this affront. Pride spoke to them out of their strong hearts, inciting them to battle. What force had deranged their reason? Who but Zeus, devious-devising, to grant, by their vanquishment at his hand, honor to his son Heracles.
    There is on the landward side of Themiscyra a dry course called