Last of the Amazons Read Free Page B

with contempt, seeing her vault wall and palisade and bear down hard upon him, wheeled to flee.
    Now from the Amazon’s throat, which had endured so long in mute forbearance, ascended that war cry which even to recall at the remove of years sends the gooseflesh coursing, and, snatching the woodsman’s hatchet she bore in the stead of a battle-axe in the brace across her shoulders, she slung this weapon upon her fleeing prey at a dead run, its warhead whistling end over end to fix him between the shoulder blades and plunge a full hand’s breadth deep into sinew and bone. The force of the blow drove the brute face-foremost into the dirt, where he struck and bounced, arms neither flung wide in agony nor extended before him to break the fall but hanging slack at his sides, and slid upon his chest as a stone skipped across a pond, to skid crown-first into the wattle underpan of the sows’ trough, dead as a rat and as void of locomotion.
    Selene’s mount’s hooves thundered past and, strewing straw as she heeled him hard over, slewed round the corner and raced away up the slope, trampling the grafted vines which had been staked out just that forenoon. She vanished beneath the olives of the rise, leaving naught but hoof-punched dust to drift and settle, punctuating her flight.

2
    ELEUTHERA MEANS
FREEDOM

    T wo nights later I woke to find my sister flown. I knew at once she had fled to follow Selene. The transom beneath the eaves was our accustomed escape (as our little room had no window and no outer door); in moments I was up and over, barefoot, and away into the woods.
    There must have been fifty hiding places employed by Europa and me, to any of which she could have flown, yet my feet bore me toward that plane grove, our academy of silence, where Selene sacrificed a dove to the moon at each solstice. Once in winter when I had stamped there with the cold, our governess had made Europa and me (for one may not be scourged apart from the other) stand nightlong in frost so hard we lost sensation to the waist. I crested the slope now, lungs heaving, only to have a blow unseen cut my feet from beneath me. I plunged, on my back in my nightshirt, to discover a form atop my chest and a blade at my throat.
    â€œWho has followed you?”
    It was Europa. She was naked. Dark as it was, I could see three slashes carved in echelon into the flesh of her breast. This was the
matrikon,
the ritual self-mutilation practiced by the Amazons on the eve of battle.
    â€œWhat have you done to yourself?” I cried.
    My sister’s horse Redhead waited, laden with kit.
    â€œYou mean to track Selene!”
    Europa hissed me silent. “Why did you follow, Bones?” (This is the name I was called as a child, for the dearth of meat on my frame.)
    â€œTake me with you!” I begged.
    Europa had mounted to the crown of the slope and held there, motionless, listening. At last satisfied that no one had tracked me, she skidded down and again seized me by the wrist. “There, feel it?”
    She thrust my hand between her legs.
    â€œI bleed woman’s blood.”
    The hair stood erect over all my body. My sister’s first moon flow. She was a woman now. I could see from the churned earth that she had been dancing. She turned from me in a state of exaltation and elevated both arms toward the moon, which was her namesake, Europa “Broad Face,” as it was Selene’s “Full Moon.” Her breath steamed upon the air. I marveled to behold her in this transport, impaled in ecstasy upon that shaft which lanced silver between the trees.
    â€œTake me with you, sister!”
    â€œYou must keep this secret. You heard the men today!”
    Indeed at dawn this day Europa and I had trekked into the city to the site of the Assembly and there watched from the
peuke
copse at the brow of the Pnyx (along with other children, slaves, and women debarred by law from deliberations of policy) as the men debated