Last of the Amazons by Steven Pressfield

Author:Steven Pressfield [Pressfield, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780754018391
Amazon: 0553382047
Barnesnoble: 0553382047
Publisher: Bantam
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

213

AST OF THE AMAZONS

Citations of approval growled from the gorges of the Council. “It was my folly that brought this necessity upon us.” Hippolyta meant the surrender of her virgin girdle to Heracles, which act decades prior had prompted the bloodbath of the champions. “By my appeasement of the Greeks, two generations gone, has their aggressiveness grown wanton and inflamed. To this offense I own. I ask you now to let me make it good.

“Let us enlist hate now, as we should have then. “Let us invoke Ares now, as we should have then. “Let us make war now, as we should have then! “Athens!

“Let us strike there, at the belly of the beast, and bring it low!” At once cries burst from the Council: Aii-ee! Ai-ee! Even the sober elders whooped. Outside the chamber the tribes had massed in their multitudes. Hippolyta could hear the pages and heralds relaying her words and the roars of approval ascending in rejoinder. The queen rose, drawing the Council in her train, and emerged beneath the dark moon whose face is Hecate of the Crossroads, mistress of the track to hell, and, mounting the stand before the people, pronounced for their hearing all that had been debated and proposed within. The nations roared in approbation. Eleuthera looked on, watching the spark she had struck ignite to conflagration.

“As to the male nations of the steppe,” Hippolyta addressed the daughters of tal Kyrte, “let us not make war upon them but enlist them to our cause. I will treat with these myself, the Massa Getai and Thyssa Getai, Taurians, Maeotians and Gagarians, Mysians, Carians and Cappadocians. I will approach the Colchians and Chalybes and Issedones, Phrygians and Lykians, Trojans and Dardanians, Saii and Androphagai, the Black Cloaks and the Tower People, Saiian, Trallian, and Strymonian Thracians, the Royal Scyths and the Scyths of the Copper River. They will come

STEVEN PRESSFIELD

214

for plunder and glory. Even those of the Iron Mountains will fight at our shoulders. They will be swept up as wildfire on the steppe!” Acclamation saluted this. The cry of “Antiope! Antiope!” rang beneath the cresset flare of Hecate Dark Moon. Two years it took to forge the alliance. But at last, at the floe-mantled straits of the Cimmerian Bosporus, the hour of departure had arrived. Two hundred thousand marshaled on the shore; the crossing buckled with drift ice gale-borne from Greater Scythia. The order of march called for the army to cross as a body following the night sacrifice to Cybele and Asia, but numbers of high-spirited novices, and particularly the horse troops of the Fox River clans, could not be held. They bolted onto the floe field, driving their mounts in that sport called macronessa, which is played with a stuffed skull wrapped in ox hide, and which they contested by torchlight all the way across. To the brink of the ice the main body advanced. I rode Daybreak, trailing Knothole and Thrush, the first laden with bedding, armor, and spare arms beneath a bearskin mantle lapped across his chest to protect on the headwind marches.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.