An Amazon Laments

It was easy to blame it on the Persians. But even when I did so, I was conscious that was not what we would have done in the old days. Then, I would have said what I thought, which was that if we were simply victims, we had no redress from our own power. Maybe that was right now. That was why I usually wept quietly at the Temple.

The memorial was sufficient. The names of the Three Hundred. My beloved Artemis, Lydia, Alexa and the others. Oh, how the memory hurt! Arti, her long, strong legs, that tight arse, made firm by hours of squats as she trained; and how I loved to watch the training. Her breasts firm, the muscles developed to hold them so. Her arms slightly muscled, yet wonderful when they caressed me. How I had loved being folded into her bosom. Her athleticism was not confined to the track or the battlefield; in the bedchamber too she was victorious. Not all tears are bad.

I remembered that last time. She had first taken me as we both loved most. On my hands and knees, my knees drawn up under me, splayed open so my sex and arse holes were hers to choose as she willed. I knew some of the sisterhood thought such a position demeaning and would refuse to adopt it, but with Arti it was a sign of the utter trust we had in each other. I wanted to be open to her in every way. I could see that with another it might have led to abuse, but with us it was the ultimate aphrodisiac.

She had donned the Sapphic stick used by those in the sisterhood who claimed leadership. As the soothsayer, I could have claimed it, but with Arti it would have been absurd. I was not born for the fray, but rather to advise and to help those who were; I knew my place. With Arti in the bedchamber it was head down and arse up.

I was so ready for her that she said she could see my sex glistening. She asked me who owned me, a thought that aroused us both, as did my answer of: "You do Mistress!" This, too was unheard of in the sisterhood. We were equals, not least in the bedchamber. But between us there was a special bond, and one way of expressing it was this. She was special to me and this was our way of saying something beyond the conventional "I love you." That seemed hardly to scratch the surface.

To recall now her thrusting into me is to make myself wet. When I get home, I will attend to that, thinking of her. But here, well it is a comfort. That last time was a pinnacle. Her mound had pounded my arse cheeks, smacking into them every time she thrust into my needy sex and making me moan loudly. She loved affirmations of her effect on me; so did I. The stick rubbed into her pearl as she pounded me, and now, as so often, our climax was one. My orgasm overtook me at the same time as hers, and we collapsed, a sweaty heap on the bed.

Then she held me. We held each other. We kissed and we snuggled and caressed. Knowing each other's body so well, we knew how to give and receive pleasure slowly and to make the time last. When we came again, it was so loving and gentle that it seemed like perfection. We knew it might be the last time; but we had hoped not. Now that memory was sacred. As long as I lived, she would live. Oh, but I missed her!

I could have easily blamed it on the Spartans. Bastards! Where the hell were they when needed? At home oiling their muscles and arguing over precedence. At the last moment they had refused to fight if the Athenians did not yield the centre to them. Fucking men! They are like children about such matters. Who the fuck cares who fights where? They do. They did. So the Spartans were not there when the Persian chariots crashed into our line of battle, so the Amazons had to bear the brunt of it.

How they fought! Lionesses every one of them. Not one of them had a wound on her back. My beloved Arti had four wounds in her chest, and some bastard had sliced her face. She fared lightly compared to those hit by the chariot wheels. It was sickening, and took all my strength to arrange the funeral pyre. I wept openly as the flames consumed her and those we had loved. And in flames, with them, went our world.

How kind of the Spartans to offer to help us repopulate our city. The Athenians and the Thracians made the same offer. All we had to do was to adopt their ways, accept that women were best used for bearing children and for rearing them; the battlefield was no place for them.

Bastards! How dared they malign the reputations of the Sacred Sisterhood. Where the hell had they been when the Persians were cutting their way through our Sisters? At home buggering their boys, that's where. It's all about release and results for them. I have talked to some of our sisters, and they miss the long, loving caresses of their partners. They miss the warmth and the intimacy. They miss a woman's knowledge of what a woman wants and what she needs; which are not always the same from moment to moment. Their men want release - and a boy child.

That is why I am leaving. I hate to go. This house is where Arti and I were happy. I have worn her tunics out with smelling and sleeping with them. Her favourite is stained with my tears. I see the changes though, and I cannot abide them.

At first, they were subtler. The husbands would pay court to their wife to be. There were presents and ceremonies. Then came the banquet after which we had been told there would be ceremonies of marriage. The men took their chosen woman. I mean took them, there and then in public. Proud women who had yielded gladly to the Sapphic stick of their loving sister, were bent over and fucked in public by men. Such a thing never had been known among us. As soothsayer I was protected, but some bastard tried it on with me - before a kick in his balls reminded him that I was off limits.

Could it have been worse if the city had fallen to the Persians? They would have taken us too, but they would not have stayed. But what should we have done then? Fate is hard. Sometimes there are no good options; sometimes even the best of the worst is bad. The men would not come on our terms, and in the end, stripped of the Sacred Sisterhood, we lacked the force necessary to resist them. We overestimated the solidarity among us as Greeks. We fought for freedom. It seems freedom applies only to men now.

Arti would not have seen the irony; having a dark sense of humour I see it. Three hundred women stood and died where three hundred men should have been. We should have seen the Persians off. Now they are at the gates, and the men say we need them. They are right. But we need fairness more. We fought and died for an ideal. Now that ideal is redefined.

It is no comfort to be able to say that I had counselled against our fighting that day. I had seen in the smoke of the sacred fires omens that made me counsel caution. But the Sacred Sisterhood had always prided itself on meeting challenges, and what men could, or would not so, women would. And now, now what?

We talked at length with the leaders of the men. They would "help," they would provide warriors to defend us, but we had to "know our place." I could sense the hopelessness among my sisters. Childless as I was, who was I to say that we should all perish rather than submit? It was, after all, as Zoe said, better to have a limited life than no life at all. So, they voted for the deal. It was, I warned them, the last time they would ever get to vote. I left and went to the Temple where I wept in front of the memorial to the Three Hundred.

I went back then to our Chamber. That sacred place. I took out the Sapphic stick, sticky still with my dried juices. Then, remembering my lost love, I pleasured myself with it and with my fingers until my climax overtook me. At its peak I screamed the name of my lost love.

I woke while it was still twilight. The first bright rays of Phoebus licked the side of the holy mountain, and the mists were rising as the rays lifted them from the tree tops. I had packed all I needed; her tunics and mine; the stick; my manuscripts.

So, it was that on that cool summer's early dawn I left my beloved Amazonia forever. I could not bear to see what it would become. Nor could I be sure that my own position would not be compromised. It seemed to affront some men to see a woman who took care of herself - and her own needs. We had already been told that women should love only men. It was, of course, in order for men to release their seed into younger men, as that bonded them for battle; but for women to lie together, that was an abomination.

I boarded the ship at the harbour. The wine dark sea spread out before me on one side, and on the other my lost paradise. As the ship pulled away and Amazonia shrunk to a dot on the horizon, my thoughts turned to the future. I had heard that Sappho had established a commonwealth for women on the island of Lesbos, and she had accepted my request for asylum there.

"Complaint, complaint, I heard upon a day

Artemis against fate, in tones of female love

saying to me 'come, for all will be well,' and

my heart rose that she spoke true,

'all manner of things will be well.'

That made me go with hope in my heart."

As I look back now, a year to the day I arrived on Lesbos, I know it was the right decision. But can we survive as an isolated enclave with Amazonia and its achievements fading into the mists of legend? We shall see. But my heart is filled with foreboding. I shall seal this and leave it with other records of our City State in the archives of Sappho. Surely we women will rise again?