Last of the Amazons Read Free Page A

now, and flew to her.
    Men gave it out that what came later was payout for the way she was shamed, or grief at the news she had borne. It was neither. For one of her race, who had surrendered and served, no further shame was possible, nor was grief grounds for vengeance but only
altare,
union with the fallen, as the Amazons call it in their tongue.
    Selene did not run away that night. Rather she called Europa and me apart, to that plane copse where she had schooled us in silence, and over three nights imparted to us her history. When an Amazon senses the hour of her death approaching—when wounded or ill, say, or on the eve of some battle before which she has received a vision or sign of her impending end—the law of her race commands her to “make her testament.” She gathers her daughters and imparts her chronicle. Such account, Selene conveyed to us, rarely takes form as a narration of events, but may contain as much of visions and dreams as of waking adventure.
    These annals Selene now delivered to us, as I this night pass them on to you. She told of her childhood upon the eastern steppe; of the arrival by sea of Theseus twenty years past; how the king had won the heart of Antiope, war queen of Amazonia, and fled with her to Athens. Selene told of the fury of the Amazons and of the marshaling, beneath Eleuthera, of their own clans, reinforced by the male tribes of the plains, Scyths and Maeotians, Thracians and Tower People, Massa Getai and Thyssa Getai, and fifty other nations, and of this army’s three-month trek west and assault upon our city. These wonders Selene narrated with such unwonted urgency as to strike my sister and me with dread (for why would she offer her testament unless she was preparing to die?) yet we were bound to silence by our love for her and the awe in which we held her.
    On the third night she led us apart to that toppled wall we children called the Viper’s Pocket and there, inserting her arm to the shoulder within a cleft, felt about and withdrew a stone adder, the serpent yet torpid with the night chill, whose poison the Amazons employ to produce that state called in their tongue
adraneia,
“no turning back.” Clamping the snake behind the neck, Selene set its nostrils adjacent her calf. She uttered no cry, nor moved, as the fangs entered her flesh and she struck off the head with her sickle. Her blade prized apart the snake’s jaws and extracted the fangs, deep as the joint of a thumb. She sang:

    Kallos
beauty,
orge
wrath,
    Heart speaks but none listen
    Save we on this path.

    Now look you there, daughters and granddaughters, beneath the moon, to that drystone wall which yokes the shearing pens to the gate of the lane.
    From there, on the noon succeeding that night, Selene came mounted on my father’s stallion, which she had stolen from its stall moments before. Between the steed’s jaws set the golden bit of Selene’s bridle; on her forearm rode the war shield of bearskin and black leopard. She whipped the beast to the gallop, while the boys and men of the farm raced in a gang to cut her off.
    Scyllus the goatherd Selene drove through with the flung javelin, there before the wall, striking him in the solar plexus with the full force of her throw, enlarged by the horse’s rising moment so that the herdsman did not even stagger but was nailed, as a plank beneath the joiner’s mawl, against the boards of the gate, slain before his mouth could gape or arm ascend to direct the alarm.
    With the bow Selene slew Dracon the foreman, there beside the spring’s hollow, and at a gallop leapt the wall, loosing a second shaft as she flew, which took the boy Memnon square in the throat, slicing voice box through and severing the column which supports the weight of the skull, so that he dropped like a sack of stones, life-fled before his carcass hit the dirt. And here Mentor, called Top Hand, who had abused Selene most brutally and handled her most