Looking up, they saw overhead a large vee of winged beasts, much larger than any birds. As the flight came closer, it was clear that these were no ordinary creatures, for each had the golden body and tail of a lion and the proud head, wings, and forelegs of an eagle.
“Gryphons!” Tithonus cried.
Gryphons. Now Hippolyta remembered. They were the same as the beast whose image she’d seen beneath the altar at Themiscyra. And she remembered something else: their sharp talons, their terrible beaks.
“Run!” Tithonus cried. “Gryphons are man-eaters. They’ll rip us apart. They’ll lap our blood and crack our bones. Run!”
But there was nowhere to run.
Besides, it was too late. The gryphons, a hundred of them at least, had descended upon the city and were even now perching on the rooftops and broken walls on every side of the square, staring down at the children as if waiting, waiting for some kind of awful signal.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WINGED VENGEANCE
“THIS IS HOW IT WAS back then,” said Artemis, gazing around the square at the creatures and frowning at them. “The gryphons came while Eos, goddess of the dawn, was spreading her rosy mantle across the eastern sky. The air was filled with their warlike screeches and the beating of their awful wings.”
Tithonus shuddered, and as if catching the movement from him, Hippolyta shuddered too.
The goddess smiled grimly. “They were sent by my brother, Apollo, sent to mete out his vengeance.”
“Vengeance?” Hippolyta asked, glancing over her shoulder at one particularly large gryphon, whose sharp lion ears on the eagle head were twitching back and forth, like a cat when it was ready to pounce. She drew Tithonus closer to her.
Artemis replied, “For the theft of his gold. The gold he uses to fashion his arrows.”
“Who—who stole the gold?” Tithonus asked in a voice suddenly made small by fear.
Hippolyta knew that part of the story. “The princes of Arimaspa,” she said.
“Amazons stole the sun-god’s gold?” Tithonus whispered.
The goddess shook her head. “They weren’t Amazons then, but the followers of exiled Scythian princes. The same avarice exists in the heart of every man.”
“I don’t want anybody’s gold,” Tithonus said more loudly.
It was a simple statement, but the goddess turned and glared at him.
Smoothly Hippolyta stepped between them. “How did they steal the gold?”
“The gryphons guarded my brother’s mines,” Artemis said. At her words the creatures around the square clapped their wings, and the sound was like a hundred swords in battle. “But an oracle informed the Arimaspans that one night in the year the gryphons abandoned their usual vigilance, the night the females laid eggs. So on that very night the princes led their men up the narrow, treacherous paths to Apollo’s treasury.”
“Ah,” Tithonus said. It was such a little sound. Hardly more than a breath. But it made the gryphons in the square clack their beaks. This sound was like the cracking of bones.
Artemis ignored them, continuing with her tale. “They made off with as much gold as they could carry and returned home to a great celebration. But when dawn rose, the gryphons came down from their mountain aerie, filling the sky like a dark storm.”
The gryphons in the square moved restlessly on their perches now, making a sound like far-off thunder.
Neither Hippolyta nor Tithonus dared move as Artemis continued. “The men of Arimaspa gathered the women and children into this very temple.” She gestured behind her. “The princes ordered them to bolt the door. Then the men drew their swords and prepared to fight. Inside, the women fell to their knees before my altar, praying for mercy and protection.”
One of the gryphons in the square cried out then, the sound of lightning after it strikes the ground and sizzles. Hippolyta felt a cold sweat break out on her back.
“The women in the temple could hear the battle raging outside,” Artemis said. “The din terrified them. But when silence finally came, it was even more ominous.”
Hippolyta nodded. The silence would have frightened her, too.
“At last Lysippe, wife of one of the princes, had the courage to unbolt the door. What a sight greeted their eyes! Everywhere lay the bodies of their men, stabbed and torn by the beaks and talons of the gryphons. The women of Arimaspa wept uncontrollably, tearing their hair and rending their garments. I watched until I could take no more of their weakness.”
“Weakness?” Hippolyta was appalled. “When is it weakness to cry for the heroic dead?”
“It’s weakness if a woman can do nothing but weep,” Artemis said dismissively. “So I found Lysippe and pulled her to her feet. I picked up her husband’s fallen sword and placed it in her hand. ‘Enough of this grief,’ I told her. ‘Enough of weakness and mourning. Rise up, woman, and take your terrible revenge.’”
“Yes,” whispered Hippolyta, her left fist clenching tight.
“Lysippe stared at the sword,” Artemis said. “There was blood on it from a gryphon her husband had killed. Green blood. I kindled in her heart the anger and the thirst for vengeance she would need.”
Artemis watched Hippolyta’s face change, grow excited, harden. She smiled, finishing the tale. “One by one, the women each took up a fallen weapon. Sending their children back into the temple, they marched behind their queen into the mountains to the cavern where the gryphons made their nests.” Artemis seemed to grow brighter as she spoke, and taller. Her hair rayed out like a great dark sun. “The women took the gryphons by surprise, stabbing and slashing with a ferocity that possessed them like madness.”
Hippolyta’s hand gripped the haft of her ax. “And did they kill all the beasts?” she cried.
Artemis smiled more broadly still. “Those who could not escape into the sky were slaughtered on their nests. When there were no more adults left to kill, the women turned to smashing the eggs.”
“Yes!” Hippolyta cried, and lifted her ax high in the air.
But Artemis’ voice was suddenly tempered, as if the fever of the story had left her and all that were needed was the story’s moral. “The women abandoned the city, of course. Lysippe promised her followers that they would never again allow themselves to suffer because of man’s folly. They sent their male children back to Scythia, then set off for the south to make a new nation of women. They would be all things: farmers, lawmakers, bakers, hunters, but—”
“But above all, warriors.” Hippolyta finished for her. This part of the story she knew well.
“Good girl,” the goddess said.
“I have heard only some of that tale,” Hippolyta said.
“Most of my Amazons have forgotten what happened here,” Artemis told her. “But my priestesses remember. Or at least they remember Apollo’s decree: If ever an Amazon queen bears a second male child and keeps it, that boy will become ruler of the Amazons and return them to the subjection of men. It may seem a harsh punishment, but my brother wanted vengeance for the slaughter of his gryphons, and I couldn’t deny him.”
Tithonus stared at the goddess and then at Hippolyta, the truth suddenly dawning on him. “Why did you bring me here, Hippolyta?” he asked.
Artemis answered for her. “To die, of course. To be the sacrifice that keeps the Amazons free.”
“But I’m not the second son,” he whispered.
“You are one of two sons, and that is enough,” Artemis told him. There was something close to pleasure in her eyes.
At that moment one of the gryphons leaped from its rooftop perch and glided down to the ground. It landed right in front of Tithonus, who fell back from it.
“Come, girl,” said Artemis, turning to the temple. “There’s sanctuary at my altar.” She gestured Hippolyta to follow her. “We’ll leave the boy to his fate.”