There would be eleven in the party to raid His Majesty's tent.
Leonidas refused to hazard a greater number; he begrudged even this many, of the hundred and eight who remained of the Three Hundred yet in condition to fight, countenancing the inclusion of five Peers only, and that purely to give the party credibility among the allies.
Dienekes would lead, as the ablest small-unit commander. The Knights Polynikes and Doreion were included for their speed and prowess and Alexandras, over Leonidas' objections seeking to spare him, to fight beside my master as a dyas. The Skiritai Hound and Lachides would go. They were mountaineers; they knew how to scale sheer faces. The outlaw Ball Player would serve as guide up the cliff face of Kallidromos, and Rooster would take the company into the enemy camp. Suicide and I were included to support Dienekes and Alexandras and to augment with javelin and bow the party's striking power. The final Spartiate was Te-lamonias, a boxer of the Wild Olive regiment; after Polynikes and Doreion he was the fastest of the Three Hundred and the only one of the raiders unhampered by wounds.
The Thespian Dithyrambos had been the force behind the adoption of the plan, conceiving of it on his own without prompting from Rooster, whom my master had not executed, after all, but instead ordered detained in camp throughout the second day with instructions to look to the wounded and the repair and replacement of weapons. Dithyrambos had lobbied strenuously with Leonidas in favor of the raid, and now, disappointed as he was not to be included himself, he stood to hand to wish the party well.
Night's chill had descended upon the camp; as the nobleman Tyrrhastiadas had predicted, fear now stood hard upon the allies; they were one rumor away from terror and one perceived prodigy from panic. Dithyrambos understood the militiamen's hearts. These needed some prospect to fix their hopes upon this night, some expectation to hold them steadfast till morning. Let the raid succeed or fail, it did not matter. Just send men out. And if indeed the gods have taken our part in this cause, well… Dithyrambos grinned and clasped my master's hand in farewell.
Dienekes divided the party into two units, one of five under Polynikes, the other of six under his own command. Each squad was to scale the cliff face independently, advancing across Kallidromos on its own to the rendezvous point beneath the cliffs of Trachis. This to increase the likelihood, in the event of ambush or capture, of at least one party getting through to strike.
When the men were armed and ready to move out, both parties presented themselves for final orders before Leonidas. The king spoke to them alone, without the allies or even the Spartan officers present. A cold wind had gotten up. The sky rumbled above Euboea. The mountain face loomed overhead; the moon, as yet only partially shrouded, could be glimpsed above the shreds of wind-torn fog.
Leonidas offered the parties wine from his personal store and poured the libations from his own plain cup. He addressed each man, squires included, not by his name, but by his nickname, and even the diminutive of that. He called Doreion Little Hare, the Knight's play name from childhood. Dekton he addressed not as Rooster, but Roo, and touched him with tenderness upon the shoulder.
I've had your papers of manumission drawn, the king informed the helot. They'll be in the courier's pouch for Lakedaemon tonight. They emancipate you as well as your family, and they free your infant son.
This was the babe whose life the lady Arete had saved, that night before the krypteia; the child whose being had made Dienekes under Lakedaemonian law the father of a living son and thus eligible for inclusion among the Three Hundred. It was this infant whose life would mean Dienekes' death, and Alexandras' and Suicide's by their association with him. And mine as well.
If you wish-Leonidas' eyes met Rooster's in the gust-driven firelight-you may change the name Idotychides, by which the babe is now called. It is a Spartan name, and we all know you bear scant affection for our race.
This name Idotychides, one may recall, was that of Rooster's father, Arete's brother, who had fallen in battle years before. The name the lady had insisted upon giving the babe, that night of the rump court behind the mess.
You're free to call your son by his Messenian name, Leonidas continued to Rooster, but you must tell me now, before I seal the papers and dispatch them.
I had seen Rooster whipped and beaten any number of times upon our chores and details in Lakedaemon. But never till this moment had I seen his eyes well and fill.
I am struck with shame, sir, he addressed Leonidas, to have extracted this kindness by extortion. Rooster straightened before the king. He declared the name Idotychides a noble one, which his son would be proud to bear.
The king nodded and placed his hand, warm as a father's, upon Dekton's shoulder. Come back alive this night, Roo. I'll get you out to safety in the morning.
Before Dienekes' party had climbed half a mile above Alpenoi, heavy pellets of rain began to strike. The gentle slope had turned to cliff wall, whose composition was maritime conglomerate, chalky and rotten. When the downpour hit, the surface turned to soup.
Ball Player took the lead past the initial ascent, but it soon became apparent that he had lost his way in the dark; we were off the main track and into the bewildering network of goat trails that crisscrossed the steepening face. The party made up the trace as it went along, groping in the dark with one man taking his turn in the lead, unburdened, while the others followed bearing the shields and weapons. None wore helmets, just undercaps of felt. These became drenched and sodden, spilling cascades from their brimless fronts into the men's eyes. The climb became outand-out mountaineering, traversing from toehold to handhold with each man's cheek mashed flat against the rotten face, while icy torrents sluiced upon him, accompanied by landslides of mud as the boulders and stones of the face released their hold, and all this in the dark.
For myself, my shot calf had cramped up and now burned as if a poker had been buried molten within the flesh. Each upward heave compelled exertion of this muscle; the pain nearly knocked me faint. Dienekes was laboring even more miserably. His old wound from Achilleion prevented him from raising his left arm above his shoulder; his right ankle was incapable of flexion. To top it off, the socket of his gouged eye had begun to bleed afresh; rainwater mingled with the dark blood, runneling through his beard and down onto the leathers of his corselet. He squinted across to Suicide, whose pair of shot shoulders made him slither like a snake, arms held low to his side as he writhed up the crumbling, mud-slick, rotting slope.
By the gods, Dienekes muttered, this outfit is a mess.
The party reached the first crest after an hour. We were above the fog now; the rain ceased; at once the night became clear, windy and cold. The sea rumbled a thousand feet below, blanketed an eighth of a mile deep in a marine fog whose cottony peaks shone brilliant white beneath a moon only one night shy of full. Suddenly Ball Player signed for silence; the party dropped for cover. The outlaw pointed out across a chasm.
Upon the opposite ridge, a third of a mile away, could be descried the tented throne of His Majesty, the one from upon which he had observed the first two days of battle. Servants were dismantling the platform and pavilion.
They're packing up. For where?
Maybe they've had enough. They're heading home.
The party skittered down off the skyline to a shadowed ledge where it could not be seen.
Everything the men bore was soaked. I wrung a compress and wound it fresh for my master's eye.
My brains must be leaking along with the blood, he said, I can't think of another explanation for why I'm out here on this ass-fucked errand.
He had the men take more wine, for the warmth and to deaden the pain of their various wounds.
Suicide continued squinting across to the far ridge and the Persian servants striking their master's theater seats. Xerxes thinks tomorrow will be the end. Bet on it: we'll see him on horseback at dawn, in the Narrows, to savor his triumph at close hand.
The ridge saddle was broad and level; with Ball Player in the lead, the party made good time for the next hour, following game trails that wove among the scrub sumac and fireweed. The track ran inland now, the sea no longer in sight. We crossed two more ridges, then struck a wild watercourse, one of the torrents that fed the Asopus. At least that's what our outlaw guide guessed. Dienekes touched my shoulder, indicating a peak to the north.
That's Oita. Where Herakles died.
Do you think he'll help us tonight?
The party reached a wooded upslope that had to be climbed hand over hand. Suddenly a swift crashing burst from the thicket above. Forms shot forth, invisible. Every hand flew to a weapon.
Men?
The sound receded swiftly above.
Deer.
In a heartbeat the beasts were a hundred feet gone. Silence. Just the wind, tearing the treetops above us.
For some reason, this serendipitous find heartened the party tremendously. Alexandras pushed forward into the thicket. The earth where the deer had taken shelter was dry, crushed and matted where the herd had lain, flank-to-flank. Feel the grass. It's still warm.
Ball Player assumed a stance to urinate. Don't, Alexan-dros nudged him. Or the deer will never use this nest again.
What's that to you?
Piss down the slope, Dienekes commanded.
Odd as it sounds, the feeling within that cozy copse evoked a hearth of home, a haven. One could still smell that deery smell, the gamy scent of their coats. None of the party spoke, yet each, I will wager, was thinking the same thought: how sweet it would be, right now, to lie down here like the deer and close one's eyes. To allow all fear to depart one's limbs. To be, just for a moment, innocent of terror.
It's good hunting country, I observed. Those were boar runs we passed through. I'll bet there are bear up here, and even lion.
Dienekes' glance met Alexandras' with a glint. We'll have ourselves a hunt here. Next fall. What do you say?
The youth's broken face contorted into a grin.
You'll join us, Rooster, Dienekes proposed. We'll take a week and make an event of it. No horses or beaters, just two dogs per man. We'll live off the hunt and come home draped in lionskins like Herakles. We'll even invite our dear friend Polynikes.
Rooster regarded Dienekes as if he had gone mad. Then a wry grin settled into place upon his features.
Then it's settled, my master said. Next fall.
From the succeeding crest the party followed the watercourse down. The torrent was loud and discipline got careless. From out of nowhere arose voices.
Every man froze.
Rooster crouched in the lead; the party was strung out in column, the worst possible lineup to fight from. Are they speaking Persian? Alexandras whispered, straining his ears toward the sound.
Suddenly the voices froze too.
They had heard us.
I could see Suicide, two steps below me, silently stretch behind his shoulder, slipping a pair of darning needles from his quiver. Dienekes, Alexandras and Rooster all clutched eight-footers;
Ball Player readied a throwing axe.
Hey, fuckers. Is that you?
Out of the darkness stepped Hound, the Skirite, with a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other.
By the gods, you scared the shit out of us!
It was Polynikes' party, pausing to gnaw a heel of dry bread.
What is this, a picnic? Dienekes slid down among them. We all clapped our mates in relief.
Polynikes reported that the out route his party had taken, the lower track, had been fast and easy.
They had been in this clearing a quarter of an hour.
Come down here. The Knight motioned to my master. Take a look at this.
The whole party followed. On the opposite bank of the watercourse, ten feet up the slope, stretched a track wide enough for two men to pass abreast. Even in the deep shadow of the gorge, you could see the churned-up earth.
It's the mountain track, the one the Immortals are taking. What else can it be?
Dienekes knelt to feel the earth. It was freshly trodden, the passage no more than two hours old.
You could glimpse on the uphill side the ridges where the marching soles of the Ten Thousand had caved the hill in, and the slides on the downslope from the weight of their passage.
Dienekes chose one of Polynikes' men, Telamonias the boxer, to retrace the track their party had taken and inform Leonidas. The man groaned with disappointment. None of that, Dienekes snapped. You're the fastest who knows the trail. It has to be you.
The boxer sprinted off.
Another of Polynikes' party was absent. Where's Doreion?
Down the track. Taking a snoop.
A moment later the Knight, whose sister Altheia was Polynikes' wife, came loping into view from below. He was gymnos, naked for speed.
What happened to your dog? Polynikes greeted him merrily. The little fellow has shriveled into an acorn.
The Knight grinned and snatched his cloak from where it hung upon a tree. He reported that the track ended about a quarter mile down. There an entire forest had been felled, probably this very evening, immediately after the Persians had learned of the track. The Immortals had no doubt marshaled there, on the freshly cleared ground, before setting out.
What's there now?
Cavalry. Three, maybe four squadrons.
These were Thessalians, the Knight reported. Greeks whose country had gone over to the enemy.
They're snoring like farmers. The fog is soup. Every nose is buried in a cloak, sentries too.
Can we go around?
Doreion nodded. It's all pine. A carpet of soft needles. You can cross on a dead run and not make a sound.
Dienekes indicated the clearing in which the parties now stood. This will be our rally point. We'll assemble here after. You'll guide us back from this point, Doreion, or one of your party, by the way you came, the fast way.
Dienekes had Rooster rebrief both parties on the layout of the enemy camp, in case something happened to him on the way down. The last of the wine was shared out. The skin in its sequence chanced to pass from Polynikes' hand to Rooster's. The helot seized this moment of intimacy before action. Tell me the truth. Would you have killed my son that night with the krypteia?
I'll kill him yet, the runner answered, if you fuck us up tonight.
In that case, the helot said, I look forward with even greater anticipation to your death.
It was time for Ball Player to depart. He had agreed to guide the party this far and no farther. To the surprise of all, the outlaw seemed torn. Look, he offered haltingly, I want to keep on with you, you're good men, I admire you. But I can't in good conscience without being compensated.
This struck the entire party as hilarious.
Your scruples are stern, outlaw, Dienekes observed.
You want compensation? Polynikes clutched his own privates. I'll save this for you.
Ball Player alone did not laugh.
Goddamn you, he muttered, more to himself than to the others. With further grumbled curses, he took his place in the undermanned column. He was staying.
The party would no longer be divided; from here it would advance in teams of five, Ball Player attached to Polynikes' four to make up for Telamonias, but in tandem, each unit supporting the other.
The squads ghosted without incident past the snoozing Thessalians. The presence of this Greek cavalry was extremely good fortune. The way back, if there was one, would inevitably be in disorder; it would be of no small advantage to have a landmark as conspicuous in the dark as an acreswide swath of felled forest. The Thessalians* horses could be stampeded to create confusion, and, if the party had to flee under fire through their camp, its shouts to one another in Greek would not betray it among the Greek-speaking Thes-salians.
Another half hour brought the squads to the edge of a wood directly above the citadel of Trachis.
The channel of the Asopus thundered beneath the city walls. It roared in torrent, deafening, with a sharp cold wind keening down the throat of the gorge.
We could see the enemy camp now. Surely no sight beneath heaven, not Troy under siege, nor the war of the gods and Titans itself, could have equaled in scale that which now spread before our vision.
As far as the eye could see, three miles of plain extending to the sea, five miles across, with plain and more plain extending beyond sight around the shoulders of the Trachinian cliffs, thousands of acres square and all of it incandescent with the mist-magnified fires of the enemy. So much for them packing up. Dienekes motioned Rooster to him. The helot laid it out as he remembered:
Xerxes' horses drink upstream of all, before the rest of the camp. Rivers are sacred to the Persians and must be preserved unprofaned. The whole upper valley is staked out as pasturage.
The Great King's pavilion, so Rooster swore, stood at the head of the plain, within bowshot of the river.
The party dropped down, directly beneath the citadel walls, and entered the current. The Eurotas in Lakedaemon is mountain-fed; even in summer its snowmelt is bone-numb-ingly cold. The Asopus was worse. One's limbs went to ice within moments. It was so cold we feared for our safety; if you had to get out and run, you couldn't feel your own legs and feet.
Mercifully the torrent lessened a few hundred yards down. The party rolled its cloaks into bundles and floated them on shields turned bowls-up. Dams had been erected by the enemy to abate the torrent and facilitate the watering of horses and men. Pickets had been stationed atop these, but the fog and wind made conditions so inhospitable, the hour was so late and the sentries so complacent, deeming infiltration unthinkable, that the party was able to steal past, bellying over the spillways, then coasting swiftly into the shadows along the bank.
The moon had set. Rooster could not pick out His Majesty's pavilion. It was here, I swear it!
He pointed across to a rise of land, upon which stood nothing but a street of grooms' tents snapping in the wind and a rope picket line shoulder-to-shoulder with horses standing miserably in the gale. They must have moved it.
Dienekes himself drew his blade. He was going to open Rooster's throat on the spot as a traitor.
Rooster swore by every god he could think of; he wasn't lying. Things look different in the dark, he offered lamely.
Polynikes saved him. I believe him, Dienekes. He's so fucking stupid, this is just the way he would screw it up.
The party slithered on, neck-deep in marrow-numbing rapids. At one point Dienekes' leg became snarled in a tangle of reeds; he had to submerge with his xiphos to cut himself free. He came up snorting.
I asked what he was laughing at.
I was just wondering if it was possible to get any more miserable. He chuckled darkly. I suppose if a river snake crawled up my ass and gave birth to quintuplets…
Suddenly Rooster's hand nudged my master's shoulder. A hundred paces ahead stood another dam and spillway. Three linen pavilions abutted a pleasant beach; a lantern-lit walkway snaked up the slope, past a hide corral in which were confined a dozen blanket-draped war mounts of such magnificence that the worth of each alone must have equaled the produce of a small city.
Directly above rose a copse of oak, lit by iron cressets howling in the gale, and beyond, past a single picket line of Egyptian marines, could be glimpsed the pennanted kingposts of a pavilion so vast it looked like it housed a battalion.
That's it. Rooster pointed. That's Xerxes' tent.
The warrior's thoughts at the brink of action, my master had often observed (as the student of fear he ever declared himself to be), follow a pattern unvarying and ineluctable. There appears always an interval, often brief as a heartbeat, wherein the inward eye summons the following tripartite vision, often in the selfsame order:
First to the inmost heart appear the faces of those he loves who do not share his immediate peril: his wife and mother, his children, particularly if they are female, particularly if they are young.
These who will remain beneath the sun and preserve within their hearts the memory of his passage, the warrior greets with fondness and compassion. To them he bequeaths his love and to them bids farewell.
Next arise before the inward eye the shades of those already across the river, they who stand awaiting upon the distant shore of death. For my master these comprised his brother, Iatrokles, his father and mother and Arete's brother, Idotychides. These, too, the warrior's heart greets in silent vision, summons their aid and then releases.
Lastly advance the gods, whichever a man feels have favored him most, whichever he feels himself most to have favored. Into their care he releases his spirit, if he can.
Only when this triple obligation has been requited does the warrior revert to the present and turn, as if arising from a dream, to those at his shoulder, they who in a moment will undergo with him the trial of death. Here, Dienekes often observed, is where the Spartans most hold advantage over all who face them in battle. Beneath what alien banner could one discover at his shoulder such men as Leonidas, Alpheus, Maron, or here in this dirt Doreion, Polynikes and my mas-ter, Dienekes, himself? These who will share the ferry with him, the warrior's heart embraces with a love surpassing all others granted by the gods to humankind, save only that of a mother for her babe. To them he commits all, as they all to him.
My own eyes now glanced to Dienekes, crouched upon the riverbank helmetless in his scarlet cloak which showed dead black in the darkness. His right hand was kneading the joints of his immobile ankle seeking to restore flexion, as he in compact phrase issued the instructions which would drive the men he commanded into action. At his shoulder Alexandras had scraped a fistful of sand from the bank and was scoring it along the haft of his eight-footer, abrading the surface for a grip. Polynikes with a curse worked his forearm into the sodden bronze and leather sleeve of his shield, seeking the point of balance and proper hold upon the gripcord. Hound and Lachides, Ball Player, Rooster and Doreion likewise completed their preparations. I glanced to Suicide. He was sorting swiftly through his darning needles, like a surgeon selecting his instalment, picking those three, one for his throwing hand, two for his free, whose heft and balance promised the truest flight. I moved in a crouch beside the Scythian, with whom I was paired in the assault. See you in the ferry, he said, and tugged me with him toward the flank from which we would attack.
Would his be the last face I would see? This Scythian, mentor and instructor to me since I was fourteen. He had taught me cover and interval, dress and shadow; how to stanch a puncture wound, set a broken collarbone; how to take down a horse upon the open field, drag a wounded warrior from battle using his cloak. This man with his skill and fearlessness could have hired himself out as a mercenary to any army in the world. To the Persians if he wished. He would have been appointed captain-of-a-hundred, achieved fame and glory, women and wealth. Yet he chose to remain in the harsh academy of Lakedaemon, in service for no pay. I thought of the merchant Elephantinos. Of all in camp, Suicide had taken most to this gay, ebullient fellow; the pair had become fast friends. On the evening before the first battle, when my master's platoon had settled, preparing the evening meal, this Elephantinos had appeared upon his rounds. He had traded away all his wares, bartered his waggon and ass, sold even his own cloak and shoes. Now on this night he circulated with a basket of pears and sweetmeats, distributing these treats to the warriors as they sat to their suppers. He stopped beside our fire. My master often sacrificed in the evenings; nothing much, just a crust of barley loaf and a libation, not praying aloud, just offering within his heart a few silent words to the gods. He would never reveal the contents of his prayer, but I could read it upon his lips and overhear the odd mumble. He was praying for Arete and his daughters.
It is these young boys who should practice such piety, the merchant observed, not you grisly veterans!
Dienekes greeted the emporos warmly. You mean 'grizzled,' my friend.
I mean grisly, week up to thees!
He was invited to sit. Bias was still alive then; he joked with the merchant about his want of forethought. How will the old-timer get away now, without his ass and waggon?
Elephantinos made no reply.
Our friend will not be leaving, Dienekes spoke softly, his gaze upon the earth.
Alexandras and Ariston arrived with a hare they had traded for with some boys from Alpenoi village. The old man smiled at the comradely ragging they endured from their mates over this prize. It was a winter hare, so scrawny it wouldn't flavor a stew for two men, let alone sixteen.
The merchant regarded my master.
To see you veterans with gray in your beards, it is only right that you should stand here at the Gates. But these boys. His gesture indicated Alexandros and Ariston, including in its sweep myself and several other squires barely out of their teens. How may I leave, when these babes remain?
I envy you comrades, the merchant continued when the emotion had cleared from his throat. I have searched all my life for that which you have possessed from birth, a noble city to belong to. His smithy-scarred hand indicated the fires springing to life across the camp and the warriors, old and young, now settling beside them. This will be my city. I will be her magistrate and her physician, her orphans' father and her fool.
He handed out his pears and moved on. One could hear the laughter he brought to the next fire, and the one after that.
The allies had been on station at the Gates for four nights then. They had observed the scale of the Persian host, on land and sea, and knew well the odds insuperable that faced them. Yet it was not until that moment, I felt, at least for my master's platoon, that the reality of the peril to Hellas and the imminence of the defenders' own extinction truly struck home. A profound soberness settled with the vanishing sun.
For long moments no one spoke. Alexandros was skinning the hare, I was grinding barley meal in a handmill; Medon prepared the ground oven, Black Leon was chopping onions. Bias reclined against the stump of an oak felled for firewood, with Leon Donkeydick upon his left. To the startle-ment of all, Suicide began to speak.
There is a goddess in my country called Na'an, the Scythian broke the silence. My mother was a priestess of this cult, if such a grand title may be applied to an illiterate countrywoman who lived all her life out of the back of a waggon. My mind is recalled to this by our friend the merchant and the two-wheeled cart he calls his home.
This was as much speech at one time as I, or any other, had heard Suicide give voice to. All expected him to halt right there. To their astonishment, the Scythian continued.
His priestess mother taught him, Suicide said, that nothing beneath the sun is real. The earth and everything upon it is but a forestander, the material embodiment of a finer and more profound reality which exists immediately behind it, invisible to mortal sense. Everything we call real is sustained by this subtler fundament which underlies it, indestructible, unglimpsed beyond the curtain.
My mother's religion teaches that those things alone are real which cannot be perceived by the senses. The soul. Mother love. Courage. These are closer to God, she taught, because they alone are the same on both sides of death, in front of the curtain and behind.
When I first came to Lakedaemon and beheld the phalanx, Suicide went on, I thought it the most ludicrous form of warfare I had ever seen. In my country we fight on horseback. This to me was the only way, grand and glorious, a spectacle that stirs the soul. The phalanx looked like a joke to me. But I admired the men, their virtue, which was so clearly superior to that of every other nation I had observed and studied. It was a puzzle to me.
I glanced to Dienekes across the fire, to see if he had previously heard these thoughts articulated by Suicide, perhaps in the years before I had entered his service, when the Scythian alone stood as his squire. Upon my master's face was written rapt attention. Clearly this bounty from Suicide's lips was as novel to him as to the others.
Do you remember, Dienekes, when we fought the Thebans at Erythrae? When they broke and ran? This was the first rout I had witnessed. I was appalled by it. Can there exist a baser, more degrading sight beneath the sun than a phalanx breaking apart in fear? It makes one ashamed to be mortal, to behold such ignobility even in an enemy. It violates the higher laws of God.
Suicide's face, which had been a grimace of disdain, now brightened into a cheerier mode. Ah, but the opposite: a line that holds! What can be more grand, more noble?
One night I dreamt I marched within the phalanx. We were advancing across a plain to meet the foe. Terror froze my heart. My fellow warriors strode all around me, in front, behind, to all sides.
They were all me. Myself old, myself young. I became even more terrified, as if I were coming apart into pieces. Then all began to sing. All the 'me's,' all the 'myself's.' As their voices rose in sweet concord, all fear fled my heart. I woke with a still breast and knew this was a dream straight from God.
I understood then that it was the glue that made the phalanx great. The unseen glue that bound it together. I realized that all the drill and discipline you Spartans love to pound into each other's skulls were really not to inculcate skill or art, but only to produce this glue.
Medon laughed. And what glue have you dissolved, Suicide, that finally allows your jaws to flap with such un-Scyth-ian immoderation?
Suicide grinned across the fire. Medon was the one, it was said, who had originally given the Scythian his nickname, when he, guilty of a murder in his country, had fled to Sparta, where he asked again and again for death.
When I first came to Lakedaemon and they called me 'Suicide,' I hated it…But in time I came to see its wisdom, unintentional as it was. For what can be more noble than to slay oneself? Not literally. Not with a blade in the guts. But to extinguish the selfish self within, that part which looks only to its own preservation, to save its own skin. That, I saw, was the victory you Spartans had gained over yourselves. That was the glue. It was what you had learned and it made me stay, to learn it too.
When a warrior fights not for himself, but for his brothers, when his most passionately sought goal is neither glory nor his own life's preservation, but to spend his substance for them, his comrades, not to abandon them, not to prove unworthy of them, then his heart truly has achieved contempt for death, and with that he transcends himself and his actions touch the sublime. This is why the true warrior cannot speak of battle save to his brothers who have been there with him.
This truth is too holy, too sacred, for words. I myself would not presume to give it speech, save here now, with you.
Black Leon had been listening attentively. What you say is true, Suicide, if you will forgive me for calling you that. But not everything unseen is noble. Base emotions are invisible as well. Fear and greed and lust. What do you say about them? Yes, Suicide acknowledged, but don't they feel base? They stink to heaven, they make one sick within the heart. The noble invisible things feel different. They are like music, in which the higher notes are the finer.
This was another thing that puzzled me when I arrived in Lakedaemon. Your music. How much of it there was, not alone the martial odes or war songs you sing as you advance upon the foe, but in the dances and the choruses, the festivals and the sacrifices. Why do these consummate warriors honor music so, when they forbid all theater and art? I believe they sense that the virtues are like music. They vibrate at a higher, nobler pitch.
He turned to Alexandros. That is why Leonidas chose you for the Three Hundred, my young master, though he knew you had never before stood among the trumpets. He believes you will sing here at the Gates in that sublime register, not with this-he indicated the throat-but with this. And his hand touched his heart. Suicide drew up, suddenly awkward and abashed. Around the fire each face regarded him soberly and with respect. Dienekes broke the silence with a laugh.
You're a philosopher, Suicide.
The Scythian grinned back. Yes, he nodded, week up to thees!
A messenger appeared, summoning Dienekes to Leoni-das' council. My master motioned me to accompany him. Something had changed within him; I could sense it as we picked our way among the network of trails that crisscrossed the camps of the allies.
Do you remember the night, Xeo, when we sat with Ariston and Alexandras and spoke of fear and its opposite?
I said I did.
I have the answer to my question. Our friends the merchant and the Scythian have given it to me.
His glance took in the fires of the camp, the nations of the allies clustered in their units, and their officers, whom we could see, like us approaching from all quarters the king's fire, ready to respond to his needs and receive his instructions.
The opposite of fear, Dienekes said, is love.
Two sentries covered the west, the rear of His Majesty's pavilion. Dienekes chose this side to attack because it was the dreariest and least prominent, the flank most exposed to the gale. Of all the fragmented images that remain from this brawl which was over no more than fifty heartbeats after it began, the most vivid is of the first sentinel, an Egyptian marine, a six-footer with a helmet the color of gold, decorated with stubby silver griffin's wings. These marines, as His Majesty knows, wear as a badge of pride brightly colored regimental sashes of wool. It is their custom on station to drape these pennants crosswise over the chest and belt them at the waist.
This night this sentry had wound his over his nose and mouth to protect against the gale and the scoring of the driven dust, enwrapping ears and brow as well, with the merest slitted sliver held open for the eyes. His body-length wicker shield he bore before him at port, wrestling its unwieldly mass in the blow. It took little imagination to perceive his misery, alone in the cold beside a single cresset howling in the blast.
Suicide advanced undetected to within thirty feet of the fellow, snaking on his belly past the buttoned-up tents of His Majesty's grooms and the loudly snapping windbreaks of linen which shielded the horses from the gale. I was half a length behind him; I could see him mutter the twoword prayer-Deliver him, meaning the foe-to his savage gods.
Blearily the sentry blinked up. Out of the darkness, tearing directly for him, he beheld the hurtling form of the Scythian clutching in his left fist a pair of dart-length javelins, with the bronze-sheathed killing point of a third poised in throwing position beside his right ear. So bizarre and unexpected must this sight have been that the marine did not even react with alarm.
With his spear hand he tugged nonchalantly at the sash that shielded his eyes, as if muttering to himself at the obligation to respond to this sudden and unwonted irritation.
Suicide's first javelin drove so powerfully through the apple of the man's throat that its point burst all the way through the neck and out the spine, its ash extending crimson, half an arm's length beyond. The man dropped like a rock. In an instant Suicide was upon him, tearing the darning needle out with such a savage wrench that it brought half the man's windpipe with it.
The second sentry, ten feet to the left of the first, was just turning in bewilderment, clearly disbelieving yet the evidence of his senses, when Polynikes blindsided him on a dead sprint, slamming the man on his unshielded right a blow of such ferocious impact with his own shoulder-driven shield that the fellow was catapulted off his feet and hurled bodily through the air. The breath expelled from the guardsman's lungs, his spine crashed into the dirt; Polynikes' lizard-sticker punched through his breast so hard you could hear the bone shiver and crack even over the gale.
The raiders dashed to the tent wall. Alexandras' blade slashed a diagonal in the bucking linen.
Dienekes, Doreion, Polynikes, Lachides, then Alexandros, Hound, Rooster and Ball Player blasted through. We had been seen. The sentries on either side bawled the alarm. It had all happened so swiftly, however, that the pickets could not at first credit the substance their eyes beheld. Clearly they had orders to remain at their posts and this they half did, at least the nearest two, advancing toward Suicide and me (the only ones yet outside the pavilion) with an abashed and befuddled tenta-tiveness. I had an arrow nocked in my bow, with three more clutched in my left fist around the grip, and was raising to fire. Hold! Suicide shouted into my ear in the gale. Give 'em a grin.
I thought he was mad. But that's just what he did. Gesturing like a crony, calling to the sentries in his tongue, the Scythian put on a performance, acting as if this were just some kind of drill which perhaps these sentries had missed at the briefing. It held them for about two heartbeats. Then another dozen marines roared from the pavilion's front. We turned and plunged into the tent. The interior was pitch-black and filled with shrieking women. The rest of our party was nowhere to be seen. We saw lamplight flare across the chamber. It was Hound. A naked woman had him about one leg, burying her teeth into the meat of his calf. The lamplight from the next chamber illuminated the Skirite's blade as he drove it like a cleaver, slicing through the gristle of her cervical spine. Hound gestured to the chamber. Torch it!
We were in some kind of concubines' seraglio. The pavilion as a whole must have had twenty chambers. Who the hell knew which was the King's? I dashed for the single lit lamp and jammed its flame into a closet of women's undergarments; in an instant the whole brothel was howling.
Marines were pouring in behind us, among the shrieking whores. We raced after Hound, in the direction he had taken down the corridor. Clearly we were all the way at the pavilion's rear. The next chamber must have been the eunuchs'; I saw Dienekes and Alexandros, shield by shield, blast through a pair of skull-shaved titans, not even pausing to strike but just bowling them over.
Rooster disemboweled one with a swing of his xiphos; Ball Player chopped another down with his axe. Polynikes, Doreion and Lachides emerged ahead, from some kind of bedchamber, spearpoints dripping blood. Fucking priests! Doreion shouted in frustration. A Magus staggered forth, gutted, and dropped.
Doreion and Polynikes were in the lead when the party hit His Majesty's chamber. The space was vast, big as a barn and studded with so many ridgepoles of ebony and cedar that it looked like a forest. Lamps and cressets lit the vault like noon. The ministers of the Persians were awake and assembled in council. Perhaps they had risen early for the morrow, perhaps they had never gone to bed. I turned the corner into this chamber just as Dienekes, Alexandros, Hound and La-chides caught up with Polynikes and Doreion and formed in line, shield by shield, to attack. We could see the generals and ministers of His Majesty, thirty feet away across the floor, which was not dirt but platformed wood, stout and level as a temple, and carpeted so thick with rugs that it muffled all sound of onrushing feet.
It was impossible to tell which of the Persians was His Majesty, all were so magnificently appareled and all of such surpassing height and handsomeness. Their numbers were a dozen, excluding scribes, guards and servants, and every man was armed. Clearly they had learned of the attack only moments earlier; they clutched scimitars, bows and axes and seemed by their expressions not yet to believe the evidence of their eyes. Without a word the Spartans charged.
Suddenly there were birds. Exotic species by the dozen and the score, apparently brought from Persia for His Majesty's amusement, now clattered into flight at the feet of the onsurging Spartans. Some array of cages had either been spilled or trampled open, who knows by whom, perhaps one of the Spartans in the confusion, perhaps a quick-thinking servant of His Majesty, but at once and in the midst of the attack, a hundred or more shrieking harpies erupted into the interior of the pavilion, flying creatures of every hue, howling and churning the space to madness with the wild clatter and frenzy of their wings.
Those birds saved His Majesty. They and the ridgepoles which supported the vault of the pavilion like the hundred columns of a temple. These in combination, and their unexpectedness, threw off the rush of the attackers just enough for His Majesty's marines and those remaining household guards of the Immortals to secure with their swarming bodies the space before His Majesty's person.
The Persians within the tent fought just as their fellows had in the pass and at the Narrows. Their accustomed weapons were of the missile type, javelins, lances and arrows, and they sought space, an interval of distance from which to launch them. The Spartans on the other hand were trained to close breast-to-breast with the foe. Before one could draw breath, the locked shields of the Lakedaemonians were pincushioned with arrow shafts and lanceheads. One heartbeat more and their bronze facings slammed into the frantically massing bodies of the foe. For an instant it seemed as if they would utterly trample the Persians. I saw Polynikes bury his eight-footer overhand in the face of one nobleman, jerk its gore-dripping point free and plunge it into the breast of another. Dienekes, with Alexandros on his left, slew three so quickly the eye could barely assimilate it. On the right Ball Player was hacking like a madman with his throwing axe, directly into a shrieking knot of priests and secretaries cowering upon the floor.
The servants of His Majesty sacrificed themselves with stupefying valor. Two directly ahead of me, youths without even the start of a beard, tore in tandem a carpet from the floor, thick as a shepherd's winter coat, and, employing it as a shield, flung themselves upon Rooster and Doreion. If one had had time to laugh, the sight of Rooster's fury as he plunged his xiphos in frustration into that rug would have prompted gales of hilarity. He tore the first servant's throat out with his bare hands and caved in the second's skull with a lamp still aflame.
For myself, I had loosed with such furious speed all four of the arrows I clutched ready in my left hand that I was empty and groping to the quiver before I could spit. There was no time even to follow the shafts' flight to see if they had found their marks. My right hand was just clutching a fistful more from the sleeve at my shoulder when I raised my eyes and saw the burnished steel head of a hurled battle-axe pinwheeling straight for my skull. Instinct jerked my legs from beneath me; it seemed an eternity before my weight began to make me fall. The axehead was so close I could hear its whirling thrum and see the purple ostrich plume on its flank and the doubleheaded griffin imprinted on the steel. The killing edge was half an arm's length from the space between my eyes when a ridgepole of cedar, whose presence I had not even been aware of, intercepted the homicidal rush of its flight. The axehead buried palm-deep in the wood. I had half an instant to glimpse the face of the man who had flung the blade and then the whole wall of the chamber blew apart.
Egyptian marines poured through, twenty of them followed at once by twenty more. The whole side of the tent was now open to the gale. I saw the captain Tommie clash shield-to-shield with Polynikes. Those lunatic birds thrashed everywhere. Hound went down. A two-handed axe tore open his guts. An arrow shaft ripped through Doreion's throat; he reeled backward with blood spewing from his teeth. Dienekes was hit; he buckled rearward onto Suicide. In the fore remained only Alexandros, Polynikes, Lachides, Ball Player and Rooster. I saw the outlaw stagger.
Polynikes and Rooster were swamped by inrushing marines.
Alexandros was alone. He had singled out the person of His Majesty or some nobleman he took for him and now, with his eight-footer cocked overhand above his right ear, prepared to hurl the spear across the wall of enemy defenders. -Leonid-see his right foot plant, concentrating all force of leg and limb behind the blow. Just as his shoulder started forward, arm extended in the throw, a noble of the Persians, the general Mardonius I later learned, delivered with his scimitar a blow of such force and precision that it took Alexandros' hand off right at the wrist.
As in moments of extreme emergency time seems to slow, permitting the vision to perceive instant by instant that which unfolds before the eyes, I could see Alexandros' hand, its fingers still gripping the spear, hang momentarily in midair, then plummet, yet clutching the ashen shaft.
His right arm and shoulder continued forward with all their force, the stump at the wrist now spraying bright blood. For an instant Alexandros did not realize what had happened.
Discomfiture and disbelief flooded his eyes; he couldn't understand why his spear was not flying forward. A blow of a battle-axe thundered upon his shield, driving him to his knees. I was in too tight to use my bow to defend him; I dove for the fallen shaft of his eight-footer, hoping to thrust it back at the Persian noble before his scimitar could find the mark to decapitate my friend.
Before I could move, Dienekes was there, the huge bronze bowl of his shield covering Alexandros. Get out! he bellowed to all above the din. He hauled Alexandros to his feet the way a countryman yanks a lamb out of a torrent.
We were outside, in the gale.
I saw Dienekes cry an order from no farther than two arm's lengths and could not hear a word of it. He had Alexandros on his feet and was pointing up the slope past the citadel. We would not flee by the river, there was no time. Cover them! Suicide shouted into my ear. I felt scarletcloaked forms flee past me and could not tell who was who. Two were being carried. Doreion staggered from the pavilion, mortally wounded, amid a swarm of Egyptian marines. Suicide slung darning needles into the first three so fast, each seemed to sprout a lance in the belly as if by magic. I was shooting too. I saw a marine hack Doreion's head off. Behind him, Ball Player plunged from the tent, burying his axe in the man's back; then he, too, fell beneath a hail of pike and sword blows. I was empty. So was Suicide. He made to rush the enemy bare-handed; I clutched his belt and dragged him back screaming. Doreion, Hound and Ball Player were dead; the living would need us more.
The space immediately east of the pavilion stood occupied exclusively by the picketed mounts of His Majesty's personal riding stock and the service tents of their grooms. Through this open-air paddock the raiding party now fled. Linen windbreaks had been erected, dividing the enclosure into squares. It was like racing through the hanging laundry of a city's humble quarter. As Suicide and I overtook our comrades among the wind-numbed mounts, on a dead run and with the blood of terror pounding within our temples, we encountered Rooster at the party's rear, gesturing urgently to us to slow, to stop. Walk.
The party emerged into the open. Armored men advanced toward us by the hundreds. But these, as fortune or a god's hand would have it, had not been summoned to arms in response to the attack upon their King, but stood in fact in total ignorance of it. They were simply rising to the call of reveille, groggy yet and grumbling in the gale-pounded dark, to arm for the morning's resumption of battle. The marines' shouts of alarm from the pavilion were shredded in the teeth of the gale; their foot pursuit lost its way at once among the myriads in the dark.
The flight from the Persian camp became attended, as are so many moments in war, by a sense of reality so dislocated as to border upon, and even surpass, the bizarre. The party made good its escape neither sprinting nor flying, but limping and hobbling. The raiders trudged in the open, making no attempt to conceal themselves from the enemy but in fact approaching and even engaging him in converse. Irony compounded, the party itself helped spread the alarm of attack, helmetless as it was and bloodied, bearing shields from which the lambda of Lakedaemon had been effaced and carrying across its shoulders one desperately wounded, Alexandras, and one already dead, Lachides. For all the world, the group appeared like a squad of overwhelmed pickets. Dienekes speaking in Boeotian Greek, or as near as he could come to the accent, and Suicide in his own Scythian dialect, addressed those officers whose arming men we passed through, spreading the word mutiny and gesturing back, not wildly but wearily, toward the pavilion of His Majesty.
Nobody seemed to give a damn. The great bulk of the army, it was clear, were grudging draftees whose nations had been conscripted into service against their will. These now in the dank and gale-torn dawn sought only to warm their own backsides, fill their bellies and get through the day's fighting with their heads still attached.
The raiding party even received unwitting aid for Alex-andros from a squad of Trachinian cavalrymen, struggling to ignite a fire for their breakfast. These took us for Thebans, the faction of that nation who had gone over to the Persian, whose turn it was that night to provide innerperimeter security. The cavalrymen provided us with light, water and bandages while Suicide, with the hands of experience surer than any battlefield surgeon's, secured the hemorrhaging artery with a copper dog bite. Already he, Alexandros, was deep in shock.
Am I dying? he asked Dienekes in that sad detached tone so like a child's, the voice of one who seems to stand already at his own shoulder.
You'll die when I say you can, Dienekes answered gently.
The blood was coming in surges from Alexandras' severed wrist despite the arterial clamp, sheeting from the hacked-off veins and the hundred vessels and capillaries within the pulpy tissue. With the flat of a xiphos gray-hot from the fire, Suicide cauterized and bound the stump, lashing a tourniquet about the pinion point beneath the biceps. What none was aware of in the dark and the confusion, not even Alexandros himself, was the puncture wound of a lance-point beneath his second rib and the blood pooling internally at the base of his lungs.
Dienekes himself had been wounded in the leg, his bad leg with the shattered ankle, and had lost his own share of blood. He no longer had the strength to carry Alexandros. Polynikes took over, slinging the yet-conscious warrior over his right shoulder, loosening the gripcord of Alexandras' shield to hang it as protection across his back.
Suicide collapsed halfway up the slope before the citadel. He had been shot in the groin, sometime back in the pavilion, and didn't even know it. I took him; Rooster carried Lachides' body. Dienekes' leg was coming unstrung; he needed bearing himself. In the starlight I could see the look of despair in his eyes.
We all felt the dishonor of leaving Doreion's body and Hound's, and even the outlaw's, among the foe. The shame drove the party like a lash, impelling each exhaustion-shattered limb one pace more up the brutal, steepening slope.
We were past the citadel now, skirting the felled wood where the Thessalian cavalry were picketed. These were all awake now and armed, moving out for the day's battle. A few minutes later we reached the grove where earlier we had startled the slumbering deer.
A Doric voice hailed us. It was Telamonias the boxer, the man of our party whom Dienekes had dispatched back to Leonidas with word of the mountain track and the Ten Thousand. He had returned with help. Three Spartan squires and half a dozen Thespians. Our party dropped in exhaustion. We've roped the trail back, Telamonias informed Dienekes. The climbing's not bad.
What about the Persian Immortals? The Ten Thousand.
No sign when we left. But Leonidas is withdrawing the allies. They're all pulling out, everyone but the Spartans.
Polynikes set Alexandras gently down upon the matted grass within the grove. You could still smell the deer. I saw Dienekes feel for Alexandras' breath, then flatten his ear, listening, to the youth's chest. Shut up! he barked at the party. Shut the fuck up!
Dienekes pressed his ear tighter to the flat of Alexandras' sternum. Could he distinguish the sound of his own heart, hammering now in his chest, from that beat which he sought so desperately within the breast of his protege? Long moments passed. At last Dienekes straightened and sat up, his back seeming to bear the weight of every wound and every death across all his years.
He lifted the young man's head, tenderly, with a hand beneath the back of his neck. A cry of such grief as I had never heard tore from my master's breast. His back heaved; his shoulders shuddered. He lifted Alexandras' bloodless form into his embrace and held it, the young man's arms hanging limp as a doll's. Polynikes knelt at my master's side, draped a cloak about his shoulders and held him as he sobbed.
Never in battle or elsewhere had I, nor any of the men there present beneath the oaks, beheld Dienekes loose the reins of self-command with which he maintained so steadfast a hold upon his heart. You could see him summon now every reserve of will to draw himself back to the rigor of a Spartan and an officer. With an expulsion of breath that was not a. sigh but something deeper, like the whistle of death the dai-man makes escaping within the avenue of the throat, he released Alexandras' life-fled form and settled it gently upon the scarlet cloak spread beneath it on the earth. With his right hand he clasped that of the youth who had been his charge and protege since the mom of his birth. You forgot about our hunt, Alexandras. Eos, pallid dawn, bore now her light to the barren heavens without the thicket. Game trails and deer-trodden traces could be discerned. The eye began to make out the wild, torrent-cut slopes so like those of Therai on Taygetos, the oak groves and shaded runs that, it was certain, teemed with deer and boar and even, perhaps, a lion.
We would have had such a grand hunt here next fall.
THIRTT-fOUR The preceding Pages were the last delivered to His Majesty prior to the burning of Athens.
The Army of the Empire stood at that time, two hours prior to sunset, some six weeks after the victory at Thermopylae, drawn up on line within the western walls of the city of Athena. An incendiary brigade of 120,000 men there dressed at a double-arms interval and advanced across the capital, putting all temples and shrines, magistracies and public buildings, gymnasia, houses, factories, schools and warehouses to the torch.
At that time the man Xeones, who had hitherto been recover' ing steadily from his wounds sustained at the battle for the Hot Gates, suffered a reverse. Clearly the witnessing of the immolation of Athens had distressed the man profoundly. In fever he inquired repeatedly after the fate of the seaport Phaleron wherein, he had told us, la} the temple of Persephone of the Veil, that sanctuary in which his cousin, the girl Diomache, had taken refuge. None could provide intelligence of the fate of this precinct. The captive began to fail further; the Royal Surgeon was summoned. It was determined that several punctures of the thoracic organs had reopened; internal Weeding had become severe.
At this point His Majesty stood unavailable, being on station with the fleet, which was drawing up in preparation for imminent engagement with the navy of the Hellenes, expected to commence with the dawn. The morrow's fight, it was anticipated eagerly by His Majesty's admirals, would eliminate all resistance of the enemy at sea and leave the unconquered remainder of Greece, Sparta and the Peloponnese, helpless before the final assault of His Majesty's sea and land forces.
I, His Majesty's historian, received at this hour orders summoning me to establish a secretaries' station to observe the sea battle at His Majesty's side and note, as they occurred, all actions of the Empire's officers deserving of valorous commendation. I was able, however, before repairing to this post, to remain at the Greek's side for most of the evening. The night grew more apocalyptic with each hour. The smoke of the burning city rose thick and sulphurous across the plain; the flames from the Acropolis and the merchant and residential quarters lit the sky bright as noon. In addition, a violent quake had struck the coast, toppling numerous structures and even portions of the city malls. The atmosphere bordered upon the primordial, as if heaven and earth, as well as men, had harnessed themselves to the engines of war.
The man Xeones remained lucid and calm throughout this interval. Intelligence requested by the captain Orontes had reached the medical pavilions to the effect that the priestesses of Persephone, presumably including the captive Xeones' cousin, had evacuated themselves to Troezen across the bay. This seemed to steady the man profoundly. He appeared convinced that he would not survive the night and was distressed only insomuch as this would cut short the telling of his tale. He wished, he said, to have recorded in what hours remained as much of the conclusion of the actual battle as he could dictate. He began at once, returning in memory to the site of the Hot Gates.
The upper rim of the sun had just pierced the horizon when the party began the descent of the final cliff above the Hellenes' camp. Alexandros' and Lachides' bodies were lowered by rope, along with Suicide, whose wound in the groin had robbed him of the use of his lower limbs.
Dienekes needed a rope too. We crabbed down backward. Over my shoulder I could see men packing up below, the Arkadians and Orchomenians and Mycenaeans. For a moment I thought I saw the Spartans moving out too. Could it be that Leonidas, acknowledging the futility of defense, had given the order for all to withdraw? Then my glance, instinctively turning to the man beside me on the face, met the eyes of Polynikes. He could read the wish for deliverance so transparent upon my features. He just grinned.
At the base of the Phokian Wall, what remained of the Spartans, barely above a hundred Peers yet able to fight, had already completed their gymnastics and had themselves in arms. They were dressing their hair, preparing to die.
We buried Alexandras and Lachides in the Spartan precinct beside the West Gate. Both their breastplates and helmets, Alexandras' and Lachides', were preserved aside for use; their shields Rooster and I had already stacked among the arms at the camp. No coin for the ferryman could be located among Alexandras' kit, nor did my master or I possess a surrogate. Somehow I had lost them all, that purse which the lady Arete had placed into my safekeeping upon the evening of that final county day in Lakedaemon. Here, Polynikes offered.
He held out, still folded in a wrap of oiled linen, the coin his wife had burnished for himself, a silver tetradrachm minted by the citizens of Elis in his honor, to commemorate his second victory at Olympia. Upon one face was stamped the image of Zeus Lord of the Thunder, with winged Nike above his right shoulder. The obverse bore a crescent of wild olive in which was centered the club and lionskin of Hera-kles, in honor of Sparta and Lakedaemon.
Polynikes set the coin in place himself. He had to prise Alexandras' jaws apart, on the side opposite the boxer's lunch of amber and euphorbia which with steadfast loyalty yet held the fractured bone immobilized. Dienekes chanted the Prayer for the Fallen; he and Polynikes slid the body, wrapped in its scarlet cloak, into the shallow trench. It took no time to cover it with dirt. Both Spartans stood.
He was the best of us all, Polynikes said.
Lookouts were hastening in from the western peak. The Ten Thousand had been spotted; they had completed their all-night encirclement and stood now in full force six miles in the Hellenes* rear. They had already routed the Phokian defenders on the summit. The Greeks at the Gates had perhaps three hours before the Persian Immortals could complete the descent and be in position to attack.
Other messengers were arriving from the Trachis side. His Majesty's lookout throne, as the raiding party had observed last night, had been dismantled. Xerxes upon his royal chariot was advancing in person, with fresh myriads at his back, to resume the assault on the Hellenes from the fore.
The burial ground stood a considerable distance, above half a mile, from the Spartan assembly point by the Wall As my master and Polynikes returned, the contingents of the allies tramped past, withdrawing to safety. True to his word, Leonidas had released them, all save the Spartans.
We watched the allies as they passed. First came the Mantineans, in nothing resembling order; they seemed to slouch as if all strength had left their knees and hams. No one spoke. The men were so filthy they looked like they were made of dirt. Grit caked every pore and cavity of flesh, including the creases at the pockets of their eyes and the glue of sputum that collected uncleared in the corners of their mouths. Their teeth were black; they spit, it seemed, with every fourth step and the gobs landed black upon the black earth. Some had stuck their helmets upon their heads, cocked back without thought, as if their skulls were just convenient knobs to hang the bowls upon. Most had slung theirs, nasal foremost, across the bundles of their rolled cloaks which they bore as packs across their shoulders against the biting gripcords of their slung shields. Though the dawn was still chill, the men trudged in sweat. I never saw soldiers so exhausted.
The Corinthians came next, then the Tegeates and the Opountian Lokrians, the Phliasians and the Orchomenians, intermixed with the other Arkadians and what was left of the Mycenaeans. Of eighty original hoplites of that city, eleven remained yet able to walk, with another two dozen borne prone upon litters or strapped to pole-drags drawn by the pack animals. Man leaned upon man and beast upon beast. You could not tell the concussed and the skull-fractured, those who no longer possessed the sense of who or where they were, from their fellows stricken to numbness by the horrors and strain of the past six days. Nearly every man had sustained multiple wounds, most in the legs and head; a num ber had been blinded; these shuffled at the sides of their brothers, hands tucked in the crook of a friend's elbow, or else trailed alongside the baggage animals, holding the end of a tether attached to the pack frame.
Past the avenues of the fallen trudged the spared, each bearing himself neither with shame nor guilt, but with that silent awe and thanksgiving of which Leonidas had spoken in the assembly following the battle at Antirhion. That these warriors yet drew breath was not their own doing and they knew it; they were no more nor less brave or virtuous than their fallen fellows, just luckier. This knowledge expressed itself with a poet's eloquence in the blank and sanctified weariness inscribed upon their features.
I hope we don't look as bad as you, Dienekes grunted to a captain of the Phliasians as he passed. You look worse, brothers.
Someone had set the bathhouses and the spa compound on fire. The air had stilled and the wet wood burned with acrid sullenness. The smoke and stink of these blazes now added their cheerless component to the already baleful scene. The column of warriors emerged out of smoke and sank again within it. Men threw the rags of their discarded kit, blood-begrimed cloaks and tunics, used-up packs and gear bundles; everything that would bum was flung willy-nilly upon the flame. It was as if the allies withdrawing intended to abandon not so much as a scrap to the enemy's use. They lightened their loads and marched out.
Men held out their hands to the Spartans as they strode by, touching palm to palm, fingers to fingers. A warrior of the Corinthians gave Polynikes his spear. Another handed Dienekes his sword. Give them hell, fuckers.
Passing the spring, we came upon Rooster. He was pulling out too. Dienekes drew up and stopped to take his hand. No shame stood upon Rooster's face. Clearly he felt he had discharged his duty and more, and the liberty with which Leonidas had gifted him was in his eyes no more than his birthright, which had been denied him all his life and now, long overdue, had been fairly and honorably won by his own hand. He clasped Dienekes' hand and promised to speak with Agathe and Paraleia when he reached Lakedaemon. He would inform them of the valor with which Alexandras and Olympieus had fought and with what honor they had fallen. Rooster would make report to the lady Arete too. If I may, he requested, I would like to honor Alexandros before I go.
Dienekes thanked him and told him where the grave lay. To my surprise, Polynikes took Rooster's hand too. The gods love a bastard, he said.
Rooster informed us that Leonidas had freed with honor all the helots of the battle train. We could see a group of a dozen now, passing out among the warriors of Tegea. Leonidas has released the squires as well, Rooster declared, and all the foreigners who serve the army. He addressed my master. That means Suicide – and Xeo too.
Behind Rooster the train of allied contingents continued their march-out.
Will you hold him now, Dienekes? Rooster asked. He meant me.
My master did not look in my direction but spoke in reply toward Rooster. I have never compelled Xeo's service. Nor do I now.
He drew up and turned to me. The sun had fully risen; east, by the Wall, the trumpets were sounding. One of us, he said, should crawl out of this hole alive. He ordered me to depart with Rooster.
I refused.
You have a wife and children! Rooster seized my shoulders, gesturing with passion to Dienekes and Polynikes. Theirs is not your city. You owe it nothing.
I told him the decision had been made years ago.
You see? Dienekes addressed Rooster, indicating me. He never had good sense.
Back at the Wall we saw Dithyrambos. His Thespians had refused Leonidas' order. To a man they disdained to withdraw, but insisted upon abiding and dying with the Spartans. There were about two hundred of them. Not a man among their squires would pull out either. Fully four score of the freed Spartan squires and helots stood fast as well. The seer Megistias had likewise scorned to retreat. Of the original three hundred Peers, all were present or dead save two. Aristodemos, who had served as envoy at Athens and Rhodes, and Eurytus, a champion wrestler, had both been stricken with an inflammation of the eyes that rendered them sightless. They had been evacuated to Alpenoi. The katalogos, the muster roll, of survivors marshaling at the Wall numbered just above five hundred.
As for Suicide, my master before departing to bury Alexandras had commanded him to remain here at the Wall, upon a litter. Dienekes apparently had anticipated the squires' release; he had left orders for Suicide to be borne off with their column to safety. Now here the Scythian stood, on his feet, grinning ghoulishly as his master returned, himself armored in corselet and breastplate with his loins cinched in linen and bound with leather straps from a pack mount. I can't shit, he pronounced, but by hell's flame, I can still fight.
The ensuing hour was consumed with the commanders reconfiguring the contingent into a front of sufficient breadth and depth, remarshaling the disparate elements into units and assigning officers. Among the Spartans, those squires and helots remaining were simply absorbed into the platoons of the Peers they served. They would fight no longer as auxiliaries but take their places in bronze within the phalanx. There was no shortage of armor, only of weapons, so many had been shivered or smashed in the preceding forty-eight hours. Two dumps of spares were established, one at the Wall and the second a furlong to the rear, halfway to a small partially fortified hillock, the most natural site for a beleaguered force to rally upon and make its last stand. These dumps were nothing grand-just swords stuck blade-first into the dirt and eightfooters jammed beside them, lizard-stickers down.
Leonidas summoned the men to assembly. This was done without so much as a shout, so few yet stood upon the site. The camp itself seemed suddenly broad and capacious. As for the dance floor before the Wall, its sundered turf lay yet littered with Persian corpses by the thousand as the enemy had left the second day's casualties to rot upon the field. Those wounded who had survived the night now groaned with their last strength, crying for aid and water, and many for the merciful stroke of extinction. For the allies the prospect of fighting again, out there upon that farmer's field of hell, seemed more than thought could bear. This, too, was Leonidas' decision. It had been agreed among the commanders, the king now informed the warriors, no longer to fight in sallies from behind the Wall as in the previous two days but instead to put its stones at the defenders' backs and advance in a body into the widest part of the pass, there to engage the enemy, the allied scores against the Empire's myriads. The king's intent was that each man sell his life as dearly as possible.
Just as order of battle was being assigned, a herald's trumpet of the enemy sounded from beyond the Narrows. Under a banner of parley a party of four Persian riders in their most brilliant armor picked their way across the carpet of carnage and reined in directly beneath the Wall. Leonidas had been wounded in both legs and could barely hobble. With painful effort he mounted the battlement; the troops climbed with him; the whole force, what there was of it, looked down on the horsemen from atop the Wall.
The envoy was Ptammitechus, the Egyptian marine Tom-mie. This time his young son did not accompany him as interpreter; that function was performed by an officer of the Persians. Both their mounts, and the two heralds', were balking violently amid the underfoot corpses. Before Tommie could commence his speech, Leonidas cut him off.
The answer is no, he called down from the Wall.
You haven't heard the offer.
Fuck the offer, Leonidas cried with a grin. And yourself, sir, along with it!
The Egyptian laughed, his smile flashing as brilliantly as ever. He strained against the reins of his spooking horse. Xerxes does not want your lives, sir, Tommie called. Only your arms.
Leonidas laughed. Tell him to come and get them.
With a wheel-about, the king terminated the interview. Despite his carved-up legs he disdained help dismounting the Wall. He whistled up the assembly. Atop the stones the Spartans and Thespians watched the Persian envoys rein their mounts about and withdraw.
Behind the Wall, Leonidas again took station before the assembly. The triceps muscle in his left arm had been severed; he would fight today with his shield strapped with leather across his shoulder. The Spartan king's demeanor nonetheless could only be described as cheerful. His eyes shone and his voice carried easily with force and command.
Why do we remain in this place? A man would have to be cracked not to ask that question. Is it for glory? If it were for that alone, believe me, brothers, I'd be the first to wheel my ass to the foe and trot like hell over that hill.
Laughter greeted this from the king. He let the swell subside, raising his good arm for silence.
If we had withdrawn from these Gates today, brothers, no matter what prodigies of valor we had performed up till now, this battle would have been perceived as a defeat. A defeat which would have confirmed for all Greece that which the enemy most wishes her to believe: the futility of resistance to the Persian and his millions. If we had saved our skins today, one by one the separate cities would have caved in behind us, until the whole of Hellas had fallen.
The men listened soberly, knowing the king's assessment accurately reflected reality.
But by our deaths here with honor, in the face of these insuperable odds, we transform vanquishment into victory. With our lives we sow courage in the hearts of our allies and the brothers of our armies left behind. They are the ones who will ultimately produce victory, not us.
It was never in the stars for us. Our role today is what we all knew it was when we embraced our wives and children and turned our feet upon the march-out: to stand and die. That we have sworn and that we will perform. The king's belly grumbled, loudly, of hunger; from the front ranks laughter broke the assembly's sober mien and rippled to the rear. Leonidas motioned with a grin to the squires preparing bread, urging them to snap it up.
Our allied brothers are on the road to home now. The king gestured down the track, the road that ran to southern Greece and safety. We must cover their withdrawal; otherwise the enemy's cavalry will roll unimpeded through these Gates and ride our comrades down before they've gotten ten miles. If we can hold a few hours more, our brothers will be safe.
He inquired if any among the assembly wished also to speak.
Alpheus stepped to the fore. I'm hungry too so I'll keep it short. He drew up shyly, in the unwonted role of speaker. I realized for the first time that his brother, Maron, stood nowhere among the ranks. This hero had died during the night, I heard a man whisper, of wounds sustained the previous day.
Alpheus spoke quickly, unblessed by the orator's gift but graced simply with the sincerity of his heart. In one way only have the gods permitted mortals to surpass them. Man may give that which the gods cannot, all he possesses, his life. My own I set down with joy, for you, friends, who have become the brother I no longer possess.
He turned abruptly and melted back into the ranks.
The men began calling for Dithyrambos. The Thespian stepped forth with his usual profane glint.
He gestured toward the pass beyond the Narrows, where the advance parties of the Persians had arrived and begun staking out the marshal' ing salients for the army. Just go out there, he proclaimed, and have fun!
Dark laughter cut the assembly. Several others of the Thespians spoke. They were more curt than the Spartans. When they finished, Polynikes stepped to the front.
It is no hard thing for a man raised under the laws of Lykurgus to offer up his life for his country. For me and for these Spartans, all of whom have living sons, and who have known since boyhood that this was the end they were called to, it is an act of completion before the gods.
He turned solemnly toward the Thespians and the freed squires and helots.
But for you, brothers and friends… for you who will this day see all extinguished forever…
The runner's voice cracked and broke. He choked and blew snot into his hand in lieu of the tears to whose issue his will refused to permit. For long moments he could not summon speech. He motioned for his shield; it was passed to him. He displayed it aloft. This aspis was my father's and his father's before him. I have sworn before God to die before another man took this from my hand.
He crossed to the ranks of the Thespians, to a man, an obscure warrior among them. Into the fellow's grasp he placed the shield. The man accepted it, moved profoundly, and presented his own to Polynikes. Another followed, and another, until twenty, thirty shields had traded hands.
Others exchanged armor and helmets with the freed squires and helots. The black cloaks of the Thespians and the scarlet of the Lakedaemonians intermingled until all distinction between the nations had been effaced. The men called for Dienekes. They wanted a quip, a wisecrack, something short and pithy as he was known for. He resisted. You could see he did not wish to speak.
Brothers, I'm not a king or a general, I've never held rank beyond that of a platoon commander.
So I say to you now only what I would say to my own men, knowing the fear that stands unspoken in each heart – not of death, but worse, of faltering or failing, of somehow proving unworthy in this, the ultimate hour.
These words had struck the mark; one could read it plain on the faces of the silent, raptly attending men.
Here is what you do, friends. Forget country. Forget king. Forget wife and children and freedom. Forget every concept, however noble, that you imagine you fight for here today. Act for this alone: for the man who stands at your shoulder. He is everything, and everything is contained within him. That's all I know. That's all I can tell you.
He finished and stepped back. At the rear of the assembly a commotion was heard. The ranks rustled; into view emerged the Spartan Eurytus. This was the man, stricken with field blindness, who had been evacuated to Alpenoi village, along with the envoy Aristodemos, felled by this same inflammation. Now Eurytus returned, sightless, yet armed and in armor, led by his squire.
Without a word he steered himself into place among the ranks.
The men, whose courage had already been high, felt this now refire and redouble.
Leonidas stepped forth now and reassumed the skeptron of command. He proposed that the Thespian captains take these final moments to commune in private with their own countrymen, while he spoke apart for the Spartans alone.
The men of the two cities divided, each to its own. There remained just over two hundred Peers and freedmen of Lakedaemon. These assembled, without regard to rank or station, compactly about their king. All knew Leonidas would address appeals to nothing so grand as liberty or law or the preservation of Hellas from the tyrant's yoke.
Instead he spoke, in words few and plain, of the valley of the Eurotas, of Parnon and Taygetos and the cluster of five unwalled villages which alone comprise that polis and commonwealth which the world calls Sparta. A thousand years from now, Leonidas declared, two thousand, three thousand years hence, men a hundred generations yet unborn may for their private purposes make journey to our country.
They will come, scholars perhaps, or travelers from beyond the sea, prompted by curiosity regarding the past or appetite for knowledge of the ancients. They will peer out across our plain and probe among the stone and rubble of our nation. What will they learn of us? Their shovels will unearth neither brilliant palaces nor temples; their picks will prise forth no everlasting architecture or art. What will remain of the Spartans? Not monuments of marble or bronze, but this, what we do here today.
Out beyond the Narrows the enemy trumpets sounded. Clearly now could be seen the vanguard of the Persians and the chariots and armored convoys of their King. Now eat a good breakfast, men. For we'll all be sharing dinner in hell.