Free Last of the Amazons by Steven Pressfield Page B

at her side, untethered, having endured the full furlough from Athens, apparently, above twenty days, on drink and rations as meager as her rider’s.
    Into such a state was Father cast, to behold his darling borne into camp in such extremity, as I feared would part him from his reason. He took up station at Europa’s side; nothing could tear him from her. From the burns of her flesh and the tar gummed in her hair, it was plain she had been with Selene in the Underworld. Had she too launched darts upon our men? From intervals of lucidity this much could be gleaned: she had indeed tracked Selene from Attica and overtaken her on this site. Selene had repulsed her, however, ordering her home. My sister would report no more, nor take food or be touched by any save me, and that only after much crooning and gentling. When I looked in her eyes I could not find her.
    Where was Selene? No longer beneath the earth, told the swamp people. They had seen her emerge on horseback, immediately after the melee, from an entrance to the grotto unknown to us. She had fled north, they reported. Three skulls clattered from the wale about her waist.
    Our party may not resume pursuit without interring the bones of its comrades. Yet the men could not be induced to descend again to that sepulchre of horror. Prince Atticus himself led a picked team, but at the lake of bitumen the resolve of all save the commander failed, and when he sent two back with orders to dispatch others in their stead, none above the earth would obey. Of what account is fear of hell, when hell itself yawns in your face?
    At the third evening my sister began to rave. Spasms racked her frame; she writhed as one in labor and men gave back, fearing hell spawn. Only Father, Damon, and Atticus owned the bowels to kneel at her shoulder.
    Fresh evils struck the camp. Toads, black toads, infiltrated by the thousands. Their filmy eyes bugged from the slime; they toppled into one’s stew and squished beneath his tread. A fellow woke to find his cloak freighted with their myriads; a hundred times a day men flung the loathsome vermin from their flesh. And all the while my sister wailed.
    Now the swamp people exacted vengeance for our trespass. Before, they had feared the squadron’s numbers. Now they smelled our terror and it made them bold.
    They staked a ditch across the single track out of the bog and erected a palisade to defend it. This rampart they manned in hundreds, launching their darts upon the probing parties of our company. Atticus ordered the capture of one of the swampers, that we might parley. But a man could not hang on to these creatures. Their rat-skin mantles came apart in his fist, leaving him clamping a garment so fetid he flung it in revulsion to the earth, where it melted, it seemed, into the muck upon whose surface its owner made away, lithe as a waterbug.
    The gnomes commenced to snipe. Their weapon was the bow, diminutive as a child’s, with which they shot arrows slender as reeds, whose prick upon the skin could barely be felt yet whose barbs worked in with wicked art. The punctures swelled and suppurated, inducing fever, nausea, and convulsions.
    Atticus offered our tormentors a ship, horses, gold. Any token of penance the foe required, he would donate to the Womb Goddess, if they would only let us free. But they had grown insolent, these mire denizens, and negotiated nothing. They penetrated the perimeter at will, setting poison stakes beneath the ooze and pricking men, as they slept, with venom-tipped darts.
    Now my sister came to herself. She would not heed Father or Uncle or me, but bespoke Prince Atticus directly. Following her, a party located the hidden adit to the cavern and entering there discovered the remains of our comrades. How dolorous arose that pyre upon which their bones were made to ash!
    Europa reckoned the company’s predicament and pronounced that we must break out this night or die. Such was the authority of her