" 'Are you by any chance an officer?' I asked her.
" 'Lance Corporal Melanippe, Fifth Light Cavalry,' she answered furiously. 'Get your filthy hands off me!'
" 'That's under First Lieutenant, I suppose? No matter. Are you a virgin?'
"She replied, in a tighter voice, though still as if at least as angry with herself as with me, that the Second Rule for Amazonian Prisoners of War forbade her to give any information beyond her name, rank, and unit. I cordially pointed out that inasmuch as I'd been ignorant of that rule, she'd broken it already by informing me of its existence. Amazons do not weep, but their voices tremble. She requested that I kill her first.
" 'Before what?' Then I realized, rather to my own surprise, not only that I'd been totally erect ever since dismounting from Pegasus (who grazed and nuzzled peacefully with the black mare), but that I really did mean forcibly to have her. She put up a formidable resistance, particularly for one bound hand and foot and barely sensible after her falclass="underline" certain Amazons, I was to learn later, especially those named Melanippe or Leaping Myrine, have a kind of limited Protean capacity when sexually in extremis; my lance corporal, before I stuck her, turned briefly but unmistakably into a stone crab, a water snake, a hind, and a squid, in that order. Her undoing was that, frenzied, she could think only of what she hoped were frightening or swift beasts (and, at that, happened not to think of wild mares, which would have undone me), not realizing, what I knew from Polyeidus, that anything limbed she might turn into would be bound as she was — and that my acquaintance with shape-shifters somewhat immunized me to her effects. Had she turned into a cloud, say, or a stream of water, she might've got clear; as it was, I merely backed off from the crab and held it by a backfin against scuttling off on its other legs; seized the viper safely behind the head (my brother and I were great early terrifiers of little girls with snakes we caught in the grove); and actually entered, a tergo, the lassoed hind, knowing it must soon rebecome what I lusted for. Squealing, it turned squid, only two of whose five pairs of tentacles were tied: I'd've got out fast — that beak, you know, down by the sex-parts? — but the free six suckered me, not bad actually, from the same squiddy instinct which then inked the penis it might have bitten off. A moment later she was unmaidened Melanippe, held by the hair and howling under me as I gave her squirt for squirt. Once come, I was at once appalled at having twice been so overmastered by desire, this time replacing with unkindest force my kindless deception in the grove. I withdrew, contrite; squid ink, mixed with cherry-bright blood, smeared from my shrinking tool onto her hams and cheeks, still fiercely squeezed, initialing my shame in the strokes and diacritics of a barbarous alphabet.
" 'Pig! Pig!' she spat, choking with outrage. I saw no point in pointing out to her that that transformation, had she thought of it in time, would have been spitted as her hind.
" 'Awfully sorry,' I panted. 'Long time between women; got carried away. Say, that squid was a crackerjack!'
" 'Cut my throat,' she requested, speaking into the dirt.
" 'Don't be silly.'
" 'Disembowel me.'
" 'Nonsense.'
" 'I'd kill you if I could, you sexist swine.'
"There we lay. 'I shouldn't blame you,' I said. 'I've never deflowered anybody before, you know, much less committed rape. I'm thoroughly ashamed of myself. What shall I do to make it up to you?' Her suggestions were ill-humored and impossible to carry out without ending my career. We were still for a while.
" 'In my country,' she said presently, 'we'd cut your rapist cock off and choke you on it. We'd impale you up the ass on a hot stake. We'd make you eat your own balls. O! O! O!
"A third time I apologized for having forced her; despite her oaths, spits, and thrashes, then, I cleaned her up and put her clothes in order, saving only the armored chiton as evidence for Iobates. As I worked I recounted sympathetically Anteia's rape-story; her frustration at unfair nature's one-sidedness in this area; my admiration of the excellent horsemanship of the Amazons on our palace staff in Corinth, and her own fine fighting spirit; my resolve to see her back to her outfit instead of enslaving her to my taskmaster, for whom I had no particular affection, et cetera. Putting by the Second Rule for Prisoners, Melanippe then informed me, more calmly but still in a cool fury, of the First — to die in battle rather than be taken prisoner, since Amazons must expect to be raped by their Sexist Pig Captors — and the Third — if captured by surprise, to kill oneself as soon as possible, not to afford more gratification than necessary to those same SPC's. I reminded her that I had no intention of repeating that shameful violation, of her and of my own better nature. She spat at me, unimpressed, and said that as a point of honor no Amazon, once captured and sexually assaulted, ever returned to Amazonia unless with her assailant's severed parts strung on a lanyard, for though her people, contrary to popular belief, had a high regard for heterosexual as well as homosexual connections, and copulated vigorously and freely on their own initiative with males, they abhorred above all things being forced. Their moral education, their religion, their art, even their history and mythology, turned on this point: they traced their descent, for example, from a company of some two thousand virgins forcibly deflowered by an Asian despot who then transported them en masse to Scythia, bidding them remember him kindly as having relented in his vow to kill each one after raping her; instead, those who found themselves pregnant by him killed their children, and they established a militant gynocracy to oppose the forcible suppression of their sex. Amazon, she said, had a higher meaning than the vulgar one: though a zealous leader might literally lop one breast off for symbolic reasons — Melanippe herself had considered doing so — the single-breastedness implied by the name was metaphorical and positive: one half pure woman, one half pure warrior, et cetera. In consequence of all this, if as sometimes happened a raped Amazon had no chance to take revenge on her defiler before he released her, she was not obliged to kill herself, but she must live in exile, raising the consciousness of foreign women to the facts of their exploitation — hence the isolated instances of Melanippe's countrywomen in such places as Corinth, where, while doing yeoman service, they quietly subverted the patriarchy.
"But my victim herself, ambitious in her way as I, had aspired from earliest girlhood to the grand objective of leading her sisters victoriously back to the country of their legendary origin, Samarkand; deposing and castrating the male sexist pig despot, whoever that luckless fellow might be, and making the ancestral motherland a matriarchy. From this destiny, toward which her precocious attainment of lance-corporalship was a promising first step, one fall of her horse and thrust of my yard had barred her forever; as her whole heart and mind and soul was in Themiscyra, she would not live in exile; if I was too cowardly to follow up rape with murder, she would kill herself.