Last of the Amazons Read Online Free PDF Page A

go, Bones. But you may aid me if you will.”
    I would! Just tell me how.
    â€œBuy time for me. Conceal my flight. Play the warrior when they grill you. Offer nothing. Back me as Selene has backed Eleuthera.”
    I knew she was duping me. I could tell as she took my shoulders in her hands and bent her gaze to mine in savage confidentiality. She was ceding me a spy’s errand and passing it off as a hero’s. Yet she was my sister, my champion and mentor and ideal. What option did I own but to obey her, and make my peace with being left behind?

3
    HANDSOME DAMON

    E uropa’s flight set the city on its ear. Within hours ships had been secured and provisioned, men recruited and officers assigned. The running-amok of a captive governess was one thing; but that a respectable maiden of good house (and one who, when she reached fifteen, would be betrothed to Prince Atticus, son of the illustrious Lykos) could be so seduced from her wits as to make off in the train of such a savage, this set the public cauldron to the boil. Whose daughter was next? Whose sister, whose wife?
    Censure for Europa’s flight fell upon Father, who was denounced not only for not placing a sturdier watch upon the maid (he should have known she would fly!) but for appointing a wild wench over his daughters in the first place. As for me, I came under as fierce an assault as my sire, for our offense was viewed not as a clan or tribal matter but a crime against the state, to wit, inciting an insurrection of her women. Ministers of Lykos and others came to the farm and interrogated me under oath.
    Where had Selene fled?
    I did not know.
    Where did I think she had flown?
    I could not guess.
    I was arrested. Armed men tore me from my mother’s skirts and bore me in a waggon into the city, where I was placed under detention at the town home of the baron Peteos, a hero of the war with the Amazons and father of Menestheus, who would one day rule the state. Such sequestration, I was informed, was for my own protection. I scorned this, until the first stones began crashing against the shutter boards.
    Mother had been permitted to bring my clothes and weaving. But she too had come under suspicion. Before darkness had fallen that night, a mob surrounded the house and was only dispersed by the king’s guard hastening from the palace. Nor was this corps of vigilantes constituted of men and boys, as one might expect, but women, even respectable matrons known to Mother, not to say girls my own age, some of whom had been my playmates. How they howled for our blood!
    Now it is a fact that in a crisis of lawlessness, one often discovers discharge not in the law but in the outlaw. Thus it ensued that Father’s brother Damon, the rogue of the family, materialized as our deliverer.
    Damon was our handsome uncle, seven years Father’s junior, who doted upon my sister and me, as happens frequently with bachelor kinsmen possessing no issue of their own. Damon had farmed our estate with Father up until the Great Battle with the Amazons, in which he had fought against the army of women, at first with distinction, then later, apparently, with no small notoriety. He had taken their side, at least for an interval. Athens had set a price upon his head in that season; we children could never ascertain the particulars, for as soon as one of our elders commenced to speak of the occasion, a general clearing of throats would ensue and all sprats be banished from the room.
    At any event, Damon had had to decamp out the bolt hole, as the bailiffs say, making his living thereafter by piracy and the hunt. It was he, when my sister and I were small, who made us to understand Selene’s shame at capture.
    â€œYou must remember, girls, that Selene in her own eyes has committed the supreme sacrilege of her race, that is, to deny to her lover Eleuthera, whose soul stood in her care due to the gravity of her wounds, the boon of a glorious death. No panel has