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One
The procession came through the city gates, greeted by throngs of people. First, the Standard bearers, on horseback, flags held high. Then, the officers, riding proud and victorious, swords slapping the leather of their saddles, armour wiped clean of dirt and blood. And behind them, four cavalry-men riding abreast: from the saddle of each, a tether.
The tethers, in turn, converged upon an iron collar - locked about the neck of a woman, and it was she who the city had turned out to see. She was no ordinary woman. She was tall, her face beautiful beyond words: strong cheekbones, black gull-wing brows, full dark lips, a proud nose and jaw. Her jet-black hair was tied back in a ponytail. Her body, too, was striking, but in a way nobody here had ever seen before. From her broad, brown shoulders, her torso tapered to a narrow waist, the arch of her ribcage framing the rock-hard pillows of her abdominal muscles. Her hips flared to long and powerful legs, the definition breathtaking. Her arms, too, were hard with muscle: but their power was cruelly contained. By ropes thicker than her own thumbs, the Amazon’s wrists had been bound behind her back, so tightly that her fisted hands had grown dark, and though she sometimes tugged or turned her bonds, there was no loosening them. Her full lips formed a seal around a worn leather ball, a gag held in place by thick leather straps about her head.
Behind, in a long, weary column, the four hundred returning soldiers. They had set out as five hundred, against forty-eight of these Amazons: the battle had been cruel, but ten of the fearsome women had fallen, and one, the mahogany beauty, had been captured.
Her clothes were far from the robes and rags of the city’s people. Over her breasts, a chest-plate of linked bones. Slung about her hips, a loincloth that hung between her thighs. About her arms and legs, thongs of leather, tightly tied. Her muscled limbs, hands and feet were bare: and yet she, and her sisters, had killed a hundred armoured and trained men.
The Amazon’s eyes lifted briefly to the battlements of the city into which her captors had marched her. Her face, serene, beautiful, showed no fear at all.
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