Free Last of the Amazons by Steven Pressfield Page A

not swim. Terror seized him; he wheeled for the inward shore, that ledge we had just stepped from. Stones the size of melons crashed around us. I seized the lad and shouted into his face: “You can’t go back! She’ll kill you!” He sunk his teeth into my hand. I let go with a howl. He clawed for the inboard shore.
    At this instant Selene broke forth. I saw her vault from the gallery above, an axe in one hand, a brand in the other. She slung the torch. The lake erupted.
    She had lit the soup.
    The surface-slick of naphtha roared to flame. I plunged below. Fear wrung my breath; I dumped shield and lance and catapulted to the surface. The first sight was the hair of my arms incinerating. I heard, rather than felt, my beard catch fire. The lake was aflame. Instinct taught my arms to sweep before me; for an instant I could breathe, then the surface reignited. Something tore through my shoulder: an arrow shaft bound the joint. I felt no pain, only vexation. Selene was above on the shore.
    She fired point-blank. I felt the flesh of my neck tear as the warhead ripped beneath my ear. I swam with the strength of terror. Ant dragged me onto the far shore. I turned back and saw Selene, on the hellward bank, dragging Mandrocles’ spent form from the fire. She lifted him by the hair and hacked him off at the neck. The Amazon raised his dripping, flaming head impaled upon her axe and howled a cry of such savage joy as only could be loosed here, at the gates of perdition.
    Into the asshole tunnel we wormed, Ant first, then me, then Ironhead. Cries came from above, our comrades at the cavern’s mouth. One had snaked down, threading a rope. It was my brother Elias. Ant sought to pass the line to me. It jammed. “Grab my feet!” he commanded. I obeyed, calling the same to Ironhead behind. Now from the latter’s throat arose such a cry as may never from memory’s vault be eradicated.
    â€œShe’s got me!” Ironhead bawled. His grip clamped my ankle like a fetter. He was being drawn back, out of the tunnel. Such shrieks rose from his gorge as to turn blood to water. Later, when the parties went down to collect the corpses, Ironhead’s was found thus: Selene had caught his ankles at the bung-end of the burrow (she had apparently swum the lake of fire) and wrapped them with her star belt, the plaited rawhide band her horsewomen’s race wear about their waists. She had set her heels against the stone and pulled Ironhead out, hacking him off first at the knees, then at the waist, then at the neck. The head she kept. We never found it.

7
    EUROPA
    Mother Bones:

    T hus Uncle’s recital. It requires scant imagination to conjure the state of his comrades remaining aboveground throughout this ordeal, compelled to endure first the cries of those trapped beneath the earth, themselves powerless to bear them succor, then to scent the black asphaltine smoke, ascending first in wisps, then pouring in clouds from the upper stone, followed by yet more grievous dirges of anguish, resounding close within the cavern’s mouth; while our own agents plunged to aid their fellows, and at last the ghastly aspects of the survivors, two only of five, as the earth spit them forth at our feet. Uncle could walk. He escaped with burns, a gash in the neck, and a shaft through the shoulder, while Ant, astonishingly, clambered clear with no wound at all. The graver toll was internal, that horror occasioned (as Damon told us later) by any duel with warriors of Amazonia, so unnatural and even monstrous does it strike the senses of men to encounter in the female such ferocity and want of mercy.
    On the second morn the men found my sister on a shelf of rock some hundred feet above the tunnel mouth. Her wrists had been bound with rawhide, one ankle wedged into a cleft so deeply that the stone had to be split with mawls to crack her free. She appeared emaciated and could not be made to speak. Her horse, Redhead, remained