Last of the Amazons by Steven Pressfield Read Free Book Online Page A

the Raceway, where the traders’ market stands in summer but which on this day had been cleared for the games in honor of Phrygian Cybele. Onto this field the pride of the free people rode. They sent an unbroken colt into the Greek camp, sign of challenge understood by all, and called Heracles out.
    On that day he slew in single combat Aella, “Whirlwind”; Philippis; Prothoe, my mother’s mother; Eriboia of the electrum helm; Celaeno; Eurybia, who had slain a leopard with her bare hands; Phoebe, called “Manslaughterer”; Deianera; Asteria; Marpe; Tecmessa; and at last Alcippe and Melanippe themselves, champions of the free people.
    The harpers tell it thus: that Heracles’ famous lion skin, which he wore draped about his shoulders, impenetrable to all save its own claws, had preserved him from the darts and axes of the daughters of Ares. This is nonsense. My mother was there and saw it. This she told: it was no beast’s hide beneath which Heracles took the field, but iron armor of such weight and thickness as no other could bear and still move and fight. The flung javelin caromed off this blacksmith’s plate, even at point-blank range, and Heracles was so strong that though the impact might arrest his advance momentarily, it could not knock him off his feet. Sword and spear were as straws against him, and the mass of his great club, which an ordinary mortal could barely lift, staved our bronze shields and helms as tissues of flax.
    In a duel of honor, single combat is law. Yet who, male or female, could stand up to such a prodigy one-on-one? My mother made his height at six and a half feet; I would declare him taller, even when I saw him at Sinope at over forty years old. He could kill an ox with a blow of his fist, men swore, yet I saw him as well outsprint in the races even the swiftest lads and all the men. Such physical primacy bred a fearlessness that made his precocity even more formidable. Nor were these the sum of Zeus’ gifts to his son, but supernal vision and reflex as well. At Sinope he put on a demonstration. He stood at the neck of a stone runway, hemmed by barricades, while three warriors, doughtiest in the city, slung javelins from inside a dozen paces. No one could hit him. He could snatch an arrow out of the air; sidestep its rush and catch it by the shaft as it flew. Stones and sling bullets he caught in his fist or dashed aside with his club, as boys on the line-field bat away the bowled ball.
    So they advanced to their doom at Themiscyra, the champions of our race, one succeeding another, like knights hurling themselves from a precipice. Heracles took his girdle prize, its luster now amplified by blood, and sailed home.
    A calamity of such scale had never befallen the daughters of Ares—the loss in their prime of the flower of the nation. My mother’s generation grew to womanhood in the shadow of this shame, and my own imbibed as mare’s milk both the trauma of that vanquishment and the foreterror of some more catastrophic overthrow, borne upon us by the next wave of invaders, successors to Heracles, who must ineluctably follow.
    Champion of our generation was Antiope, granddaughter of Hippolyta and triple-mate to Stratonike and Eleuthera, the most brilliant archers and riders of the day. Antiope it was, even as a child, who resuscitated the nation. At that time the ancient rite of
mastokausis,
as the Greeks call it, the searing off in infancy of the right breast, had fallen from favor. Antiope revived it. At seven years she ordered her own mutilation, that all strength, as she grew, would accrue to the muscles of her shoulder and back, and no womanish flesh impede the draw of the bow and the cast of the javelin. Not one of our generation failed to emulate her. When at age ten the trikona of Antiope, Eleuthera, and Stratonike were called to study war with the northern tribes, they went with hearts singing with joy. They elevated to a peak unprecedented