BY ORDER OF HIS MAJESTY, Xerxes son of Darius, Great King of Persia and Media, King of Kings, King of the Lands; Master of Libya, Egypt, Arabia, Ethiopia, Babylonia, Chaldea, Phoenicia, Elam, Syria, Assyria and the nations of Palestine; Ruler of Ionia, Lydia, Phrygia, Armenia, Cilicia, Cappadocia, Thrace, Macedonia and the trans-Caucasus, Cyprus, Rhodes, Samos, Chios, Lesbos and the islands of the Aegean; Sovereign Lord of Parthia, Bactria, Caspia, Sousiana, Paphlagonia and India; Lord of all men from the rising to the setting sun, His Most Holy, Reverend and Exalted, Invincible, incorruptible, Blessed of God Ahura Mazda and Omnipotent among Mortals. Thus decreeth His Magnificence, as recorded by Gobartes the son of Artabazos, His historian;
That, following the glorious victory of His Majesty's forces over the arrayed Peloponnesian foe, Spartans and allies, at the pass of Thermopylae, having extinguished the enemy to the last man and erected trophies to this valorous conquest, yet was His Majesty in His God-inspired wisdom desirous of further intelligence, both of certain infantry tactics employed by the enemy which proved of some effect against His Majesty's troops, and of the type of foemen these were who, though unbound by liege law or servitude, facing insuperable odds and certain death, yet chose to remain at their stations, and perished therein to the final man.
His Majesty's regret having been expressed at the dearth of knowledge and insight upon these subjects, then did intercede God Ahura Mazda on His Majesty's behalf. A survivor of the Hellenes fas the Greeks call themselves) was discovered, grievously wounded and in a state of extremis, beneath the wheels of a battle waggon, being unseen theretofore due to the presence of numerous corpses of men, horses and beasts of transport being heaped upon the site. His Majesty's surgeons being summoned and charged under pain of death to spare no measure to preserve the captive's life, God yet granted His Majesty's desire. The Greek survived the night and the morning following. Within ten days the man had recovered speech and mental faculty and, though yet confined to a Utter and under direct care of the Royal Surgeon, was able not only at last to speak but to express his fervent desire to do so.
Several unorthodox aspects of the captive's armor and raiment were noted by the detaining officers. Beneath the man's battle helmet was found not the traditional felt cawl of the Spartan hop-lite, but the dogskin cap associated with the race of helots, the Lakedaemonian slave class, serfs of the land. In contrast inexplicable to His Majesty's officers, the prisoner's shield and armor were of the finest bronze, etched with rare Hibernian cobalt, while his helmet bore the transverse crest of a full Spartiate, an officer.
In preliminary interviews, the man's manner of speech proved to be a compound of the loftiest philosophical and literary language, indicative of a deep familiarity with the epics of the Hellenes, intermingled with the coarsest and most crude gutter argot, much of which was uninterpretable even to His Majesty's most knowledgeable translators. The Greek, however, willingly agreed to translate these himself, which he did, utilizing scraps of profane Aramaic and Persian which he claimed to have acquired during certain sea travels beyond Hellas. I, His Majesty's historian, seeking to preserve His Majesty's ears from the foul and often execrable language employed by the captive, sought to excise the offensive material before His Majesty was forced to endure hearing it. Vet did His Majesty in His God-inspired wisdom instruct His servant so to translate the man's speech as to render it in whatever tongue and idiom necessary to duplicate the precise effect in Greek. This have I attempted to do. I pray that His Majesty recall the charge He imparted and hold His servant blameless for those portions of the following transcription which will and must offend any civilised hearer.
Inscribed and submitted this sixteenth day of Ululu, Fifth Year of His Majesty's Accession.
Third day of Tashritu, Fifth Year of His Majesty's Accession, south of the Lokrian border, the Army of the Empire having continued its advance unopposed into central Greece, establishing an encampment opposite the eastern fall of Mount Parnassus, the sum of whose watercourses, as numerous others before upon the march from Asia, failed and was drunk dry by the troops and horses. The following initial interview took place in His Majesty's campaign tent, three hours after sunset, the evening meal having been concluded and ail court business transacted. Field marshals, advisors, household guards, the Magi and secretaries being present, the detaining officers were instructed to produce the Greek. The captive was brought in upon a litter, eyes cloth-bound so as to dissanction sight of His Majesty. The Magus performed the incantation and purification, permitting the man to speak within the hearing of His Majesty. The prisoner was instructed not to speak directly toward the Royal Presence but to address himself to the officers of the household guard, the Immortals, stationed upon His Majesty's left.
The Greek was directed by Orontes, captain of the Immortals, to identify himself. He responded that his name was Xe-ones the son of Sfcamandridas of Astakos, a city in Akamania. The man Xeones stated that he wished jSrst to thank His Majesty for preserving his life and to express his gratitude for and admiration of the skill of the Royal Surgeon's staff. Speaking from his Utter, and yet struggling with weakness of breath from several as-yet-unhealed wounds of iKe lungs and thoracic organs, he offered the following disclaimer to His Majesty, stating that he was unfamiliar with the Persian style of discourse and further stood unfortunately lacking in the gifts of poesy and story-spinning. He declared that the tale he could tell would not be of generals or kings, for the political machinations of the great, he said, he was and had been in no position to observe. He could only relate the story as he himself had lived it and witnessed it, from the vantage of a youth and squire of the heavy infantry, a servant of the battle train. Perhaps, the captive declared, His Majesty would discover little of interest in this narrative of the ordinary warriors, the men m the line, as the prisoner expressed it.
His Majesty, responding through Orontes, Captain of the Immortals, asserted to the contrary that this was precisely the tale he wished most to hear. His Majesty was, He declared, already possessed of abundant intelligence of the intrigumgs of the great; what He desired most to hear was this, the infantryman's tale.
What kind of men were these Spartans, who in three days had slain before His Majesty's eyes no fewer than twenty thousand of His most valiant warriors' Who were these foemen, who had taken with them to the house of the dead ten, or as some reports said, as many as twenty for every one of their own fallen? What were they like as men? Whom did they love? What made them laugh.
His Majesty knew they feared death, as all men. By what philosophy did their minds embrace it?
Most to the point, His Majesty said, He wished to acquire a sense of the individuals themselves, the real flesh-and-blood men whom He had observed from above the battlefield, but only indistinctly, from a distance, as indistinguishable identities concealed within the blood- and gorebegrimed carapaces of their helmets and armor.
Beneath his cloth-bound eyes, the prisoner bowed and offered a prayer of thanksgiving to some one of his gods. The story His Majesty wished to hear, he asserted, was the one he could truly tell, and the one he most wished to.
It must of necessity be his own story, as well as that of the warriors he had known. Would His Majesty be patient with this.' Nor could the telling confine itself exclusively to the battle, but must proceed from events antecedent in time, for only in this light and from this perspective would the lives and actions of the warriors His Majesty observed at Thermopylae be given their true meaning and significance.
His Majesty, field marshals, generals and advisors being satisfied, the Greek was given a bowl of wme and honey for his thirst and asked to commence where he pleased, to tell the story in whatever manner he deemed appropriate. The man, Xeones, bowed once upon his litter and began:
I had always wondered what it felt like to die. There was an exercise we of the battle train practiced when we served as punching bags for the Spartan heavy infantry. It was called the Oak because we took our positions along a line of oaks at the edge of the plain of Otona, where the Spartiates and the Gentleman-Rankers ran their field exercises in fall and winter. We would line up ten deep with body-length wicker shields braced upon the earth and they would hit us, the shock troops, coming across the flat in line of battle, eight deep, at a walk, then a pace, then a trot and finally a dead run. The shock of their interleaved shields was meant to knock the breath out of you, and it did. It was like being hit by a mountain. Your knees, no matter how braced you held them, buckled like saplings before an earthshde; in an instant all courage fled our hearts; we were rooted up like dried stalks before the ploughman's blade.
That was how it felt to die. The weapon which slew me at Thermopylae was an Egyptian hoplite spear, driven in beneath the plexus of the rib cage. But the sensation was not what one would have anticipated, not being pierced but rather slammed, like we sparring fodder felt beneath the oaks.
I had imagined that the dead would be detached. Thatthey would look upon life with the eyes of objective wisdom. But the experience proved the opposite. Emotion ruled. It seemed nothing remained but emotion. My heart ached and broke as never it could on earth. Loss encompassed me with a searing, all-mastering pain. I saw my wife and children, my dear cousin Diomache, she whom I loved. I saw Skaman-dridas, my father, and Eunike, my mother, Bruxieus, Dekton and Suicide, names which mean nothing to His Majesty to hear, but which to me were dearer than life and now, dying, dearer still.
Away they flew. Away I flew from them.
I was keenly conscious of the comrades-in-arms who had fallen with me. A bond surpassing by a hundredfold that which I had known in life bound me to them. I felt a sense of inexpressible relief and realized that I had feared, more than death, separation from them. I apprehended that excruciating war survivor's torment, the sense of isolation and self-betrayal experienced by those who had elected to cling yet to breath when their comrades had let loose their grip.
That state which we call life was over.
I was dead.
And yet, titanic as was that sense of loss, there existed a keener one which I now experienced and felt my brothers-in-arms feeling with me. It was this.
That our story would perish with us.
That no one would ever know.
I cared not for myself, for my own selfish or vainglorious purposes, but for them. For Leonidas, for Alexandras and Polynikes, for Arete bereft by her hearth and, most of all, for Dienekes. That his valor, his wit, his private thoughts that I alone was privileged to share, that these and all that he and his companions had achieved and suffered would simply vanish, drift away like smoke from a woodland fire, this was unbearable.
We had reached the river now. We could hear with ears that were no longer ears and see with eyes that were no longer eyes the stream of Lethe and the hosts of the long-suffering dead whose round beneath the earth was at last drawing to a period. They were returning to life, drinking of those waters which would efface all memory of their existence here as shades. But we from Thermopylae, we were aeons away from drinking of Lethe's stream. We remembered.
A cry which was not a cry but only the multiplied pain of the warriors' hearts, all feeling what I, too, felt, rent the baleful scene with unspeakable pathos.
Then from behind me, if there can be such a thing as behind in that world where all directions are as one, came a glow of such sublimity that I knew, we all knew at once, it could be nothing but a god.
Phoebus Far Darter, Apollo himself in war armor, moved there among the Spartiates and Thespians. No words were exchanged; none were needed. The Archer could feel the men's agony and they knew without speech that he, warrior and physician, was there to succor it. So quickly that surprise was impossible I felt his eye turn toward me, me the last and least who could expect it, and then Dienekes himself was beside me, my master in life.
I would be the one. The one to go back and speak. A pain beyond all previous now seized me.
Sweet life itself, even the desperately sought chance to tell the tale, suddenly seemed unendurable alongside the pain of having to take leave of these whom I had come so to love.
But again, before the god's majesty, no entreaty was possible.
I saw another light, a sicklier, cruder, more coarse illumination, and knew that it was the sun.! was soaring back. Voices came to me through physical ears. Soldiers' speech, in Egyptian and Persian, and leather-gauntleted fists pulling me from beneath a sheaf of corpses.
The Egyptian marines told me later that I had uttered the word Wcus, which in their tongue meant fuck, and they had laughed even as they dragged my shattered body out into the light of day.
They were wrong. The word was Loxias-the Greek title of respect for Apollo the Cunning, or Apollo Crabwise, whose oracles arise ever elusive and oblique-and I was half crying to him, half cursing him for laying this terrible responsibility on me who had no gift to perform it.
As poets call upon the Muse to speak through them, I croaked my inarticulate grunt to the Striker From Afar.
If indeed you have elected me, Archer, then let your fine-fletched arrows spring from my bow.
Lend me your voice, Far Darter. Help me to tell the tale.
Thermopylae is a spa. The word in Greek means hot gates, from the thermal springs and, as His Majesty knows, the narrow and precipitous defiles which form the only passages by which the site may be approached-in Greek, pylae or pylai, the East and West Gates.
The Phokian Wall around which so much of the most desperate fighting took place was not constructed by the Spartans and their allies in the event, but stood in existence prior to the battle, erected in ancient times by the inhabitants of Phokis and Lokris as defense against the incursions of their northern neighbors, the Thessalians and Macedonians. The wall, when the Spartans arrived to take possession of the pass, stood in ruins. They rebuilt it.
The springs and pass themselves are not considered by the Hellenes to belong to the natives of the area, but are open to all in Greece. The baths are thought to possess curative powers; in summer the site teems with visitors. His Majesty beheld the charm of the shaded groves and pool houses, the oak copse sacred to Amphiktyon and that pleasantly meandering path bounded by the Lion's Wall, whose stones are said to have been set in place by Herakles himself. Along this in peacetime are customarily arrayed the gaily colored tents and booths used by the vendors from Trachis, Anthela and Alpenoi to serve whatever adventurous pilgrims have made the trek to the mineral baths.
There is a double spring sacred to Persephone, called the Skyllian fountain, at the foot of the bluff beside the Middle Gate. Upon this site the Spartans established their camp, between the Phokian Wall and the hillock where the final tooth-and-nail struggle took place. His Majesty knows how little drinking water is to hand from other sources in the surrounding mountains. The earth between the Gates is normally so parched and dust-blown that servants are employed by the spa to oil the walkways for the convenience of the bathers. The ground itself is hard as stone.
His Majesty saw how swiftly that marble-hard clay was churned into muck by the contending masses of the warriors. I have never seen such mud and of such depth, whose moisture came only from the blood and terror-piss of the men who fought upon it.
When the advance troops, the Spartan rangers, arrived at Thermopylae prior to the battle, a few hours before the main body which was advancing by forced march, they discovered, incredibly, two parties of spa-goers, one from Tiryns, the other from Halkyon, thirty in all, men and women, each in their separate precincts, in various states of undress. These pilgrims were startled, to say the least, by the sudden appearance in their midst of the scarlet-clad armored Skiritai, all picked men under thirty, chosen for speed of foot as well as prowess in mountain fighting. The rangers cleared the bathers and their attendant perfume vendors, masseurs, fig-cake and bread sellers, bath and oil girls, strigil boys and so forth (who had ample intelligence of the Persian advance but had thought that the recent down-valley storm had rendered the northern approaches temporarily impassable). The rangers confiscated all food, soaps, linens and medical accoutrements and in particular the spa tents, which later appeared so grimly incongruous, billowing festively above the carnage. The rangers reerected these shelters at the rear, in the Spartan camp beside the Middle Gate, intending them for use by Leonidas and his royal guard.
The Spartan king, when he arrived, refused to avail himself of this shelter, deeming it unseemly.
The Spartiate heavy infantry likewise rejected these amenities. The tents fell, in one of the ironies to which those familiar with war are accustomed, to the use of the Spartan helots, Thespian, Phokian and Opountian Lokrian slaves and other attendants of the battle train who suffered wounds in the arrow and missile barrages. These individuals, too, after the second day refused to accept shelter. The brightly colored spa tents of Egyptian linen, now in tatters, came as His Majesty saw to protect only the beasts of transport, the mules and asses supporting the commissariat, who became terrorized by the sights and smells of the battle and could not be held by their teamsters. In the end the tents were torn to rags to bind the wounds of the Spartiates and their allies.
When I say Spartiates, I mean the formal term in Greek, Sparriatoi, which refers to Lakedaemonians of the superior class, full Spartans – the homoioi – Peers or Equals. None of the class called Gentleman-Rankers or of the perioikoi, the secondary Spartans of less than full citizenship, or those enlisted from the surrounding Lakedaemonian towns, fought at the Hot Gates, though toward the end when the surviving Spartiates became so few that they could no longer form a fighting front, a certain leavening element, as Dienekes expressed it, of freed slaves, armor bearers and battle squires, was permitted to fill the vacated spaces.
His Majesty may nonetheless take pride in knowing that his forces defeated the flower of Hellas, the cream of her finest and most valiant fighting men.
As for my own position within the battle train, the explanation may require a certain digression, with which I hope His Majesty will be patient.
I was captured at age twelve (or, more accurately, surren-dered) as a heliokekaumenos, a Spartan term of derision which means literally scorched by the sun. It referred to a type of nearly feral youth, burned black as Ethiopians by their exposure to the elements, with which the mountains abounded in those days preceding and following the first Persian War. I was cast originally among the Spartan helots, the serf class that the Lakedaemonians had created from the inhabitants of Messenia and Helos after they in centuries past had conquered and enslaved them.
These husbandmen, however, rejected me because of certain physical impairments which rendered me useless for field labor. Also the helots hated and mistrusted any foreigner among them who might prove an informer. I lived a dog's life for most of a year before fate, luck or a god's hand delivered me into the service of Alexandras, a Spartan youth and protege of Dienekes.
This saved my life. I was recognized at least ironically as a freeborn and, evincing such qualities of a wild beast as the Lakedaemonians found admirable, was elevated to the status of parastates. pats, a sort of sparring partner for the youths enrolled in the agoge, the notorious and pitiless thirteen-year training regimen which turned boys into Spartan warriors.
Every heavy infantryman of the Spartiate class travels to war attended by at least one helot.
Enomotarchai, the platoon leaders, take two. This latter was Dienekes' station. It is not uncommon for an officer of his rank to select as his primary attendant, his battle squire, a freeborn foreigner or even a young mothax, a noncitizen or bastard Spartan still in agoge training. It was my fortune, for good or ill, to be chosen by my master for this post. I supervised the care and transport of his armor, maintained his kit, prepared his food and sleeping site, bound his wounds and in general performed every task necessary to leave him free to train and fight.
My childhood home, before fate set me upon the road which found its end at the Hot Gates, was originally in As-takos in Akarnania, north of the Peloponnese, where the mountains look west over the sea toward Kephallima and, beyond the horizon, to Sikelia and Italia.
The island of Ithaka, home of Odysseus of lore, lay within sight across the straits, though I myself was never privileged to touch the hero's sacred soil, as a boy or later. I was due to make the crossing, a treat from my aunt and uncle, on the occasion of my tenth birthday. But our city fell first, the males of my clan were slaughtered and females sold into slavery, our ancestral land taken, and I cast out, alone save my cousin Diomache, without family or home, three days before the start of my tenth year to heaven, as the poet says.
We had a slave on my father's farm when I was a boy, a man named Bruxieus, though I hesitate to use the word slave, because my father was more in Bruxieus' power than the other way round. We all were, particularly my mother. As lady of the house she refused to make the most trifling domestic decision-and many whose scope far exceeded that-without first securing Bruxieus' advice and approval. My father deferred to him on virtually all matters, save politics within the city. I myself was completely under his spell.
Bruxieus was an Elean. He had been captured by the Argives in battle when he was nineteen.
They blinded him with fiery pitch, though his knowledge of medicinal salves later restored at least a poor portion of bis sight. He bore on his brow the ox-horn slave brand of the Argives. My father acquired him when he was past forty, as compensation for a shipment of hyacinth oil lost at sea.
As nearly as I could tell, Bruxieus knew everything. He could pull a bad tooth without clove or oleander. He could carry fire in his bare hands. And, most vital of all to my boy's regard, he knew every spell and incantation necessary to ward off bad luck and the evil eye.
Bruxieus' only weakness as I said was his vision. Beyond ten feet the man was blind as a stump.
This was a source of secret, if guilty, pleasure to me because it meant he needed a boy with him at all times to see. I spent weeks never leaving his side, not even to sleep, since he insisted on watching over me, slumbering always on a sheepskin at the foot of my little bed.
In those days it seemed there was a war every summer. I remember the city's drills each spring when the planting was done. My father's armor would be brought down from the hearth and Bruxieus would oil each rim and joint, rewarp and reshaft the two spears and two spares and replace the cord and leather gripware within the hoplon's oak and bronze sphere. The drills took place on a broad plain west of the potters' quarter, just below the city walls. We boys and girls brought sunshades and fig cakes, scrapped over the best viewing positions on the wall and watched our fathers drill below us to the trumpeters' calls and the beat of the battle drummers.
This year of which I speak, the dispute of note was over a proposal made by that session's prytaniarch, an estate owner named Onaximandros. He wanted each man to efface the clan or individual crest on his shield and replace it with a uniform alpha, for our city Astakos. He argued that Spartan shields all bore a proud lambda, for their country, Lakedaemon. Fine, came the derisive response, but we're no Lakedaemonians. Someone told the story of the Spartiate whose shield bore no crest at all, but only a common housefly painted life-size. When his rankmates made sport of him for this, the Spartan declared that in line of battle he would get so close to his enemy that the housefly would look as big as a Hon.
Every year the military drills followed the same pattern. For two days enthusiasm reigned. Every man was so relieved to be free of farm or shop chores, and so delighted to be reunited with his comrades (and away from the children and women around the house), that the event took on the flavor of a festival. There were sacrifices morning and evening. The rich smells of spitted meat floated over everything; there were wheaten buns and honey candies, fresh-rolled fig cakes, and bowls of rice and barley grilled in sweet new-pressed sesame oil.
By the third day the militiamen's blisters started. Forearms and shoulders were rubbed raw by the heavy hoplon shields. The warriors, though most were farmers or grovers and supposedly of stout seasoned limb, had in fact passed the bulk of their agricultural labor in the cool of the counting room and not out behind a plough. They were getting tired of sweating. It was hot under those helmets. By the fourth day the sunshine warriors were presenting excuses in earnest. The farm needed this, the shop needed that, the slaves were robbing them blind, the hands were screwing each other silly. Look at how straight the line advances now, on the practice field, Bruxieus would chuckle, squinting past me and the other boys. They won't step so smartly when heaven starts to rain arrows and javelins. Each man will be edging to the right to get into his rankmate's shadow.
Meaning the shelter of the shield of the man on his right. By the time they hit the enemy line, the right wing will be overlapped half a stade and have to be chased back into place by its own cavalry!
Nonetheless our citizen army (we could put four hundred heavy-armored hoplites into the field on a full call-up), despite the potbellies and wobbly shins, had acquitted itself more than honorably, at least in my short lifetime. That same prytaniarch, Onaximandros, had two fine span of oxen, got from the Kerionians, whose countryside our forces allied with the Argives and Eleuthrians had plundered ruthlessly three years running, burning a hundred farms and killing over seventy men. My uncle Tenagros had a stout mule and a full set of armor got in those seasons. Nearly every man had some-thing.
But back to our militia's maneuvers. By the fifth day, the city fathers were thoroughly exhausted, bored and disgusted. Sacrifices to the gods redoubled, in the hope that the immortals' favor would make up for any lack of pokmike techne, skill at arms, or empeiria, experience, on the part of our forces. By now there were huge gaps in the field and we boys had descended upon the site with our own play shields and spears. That was the signal to call it a day. With much grumbling from the zealots and great relief from the main body, the call was issued for the final parade.
Whatever allies the city possessed that year (the Argives had sent their strategos autokrater, that great city's supreme military commander) were marshaled gaily into the reviewing stands, and our rein-vigorated citizen-soldiers, knowing their ordeal was nearly over, loaded themselves up with every ounce of armor they possessed and passed in glorious review.
This final event was the greatest excitement of all, with the best food and music, not to mention the raw spring wine, and ended with many a farm cart bearing home in the middle watch of the night sixty-five pounds of bronze armor and a hundred and seventy pounds of loudly snoring warrior.
This morning, which initiated my destiny, came about because of ptarmigan eggs.
Among Bruxieus' many talents, foremost was his skill with birds. He was a master of the snare.
He constructed his traps of the very branches his prey favored to roost upon. With a pop! so delicate you could hardly hear it, his clever snares would fire, imprisoning their mark by the boot as Bruxieus called it, and always gently.
One evening Bruxieus summoned me in secrecy behind the cote. With great drama he lifted his cloak, revealing his latest prize, a wild ptarmigan cock, full of fight and fire. I was beside myself with excitement. We had six tame hens in the coop. A cock meant one thing – eggs! And eggs were a supreme delicacy, worth a boy's fortune at the city market.
Sure enough, within a week our little banty had become the strutting lord of the walk, and not long thereafter I cradled in my palms a clutch of precious ptarmigan eggs.
We were going to town! To market. I woke my cousin Diomache before the middle watch was over, so eager was I to get to our farm's stall and put my clutch up for sale. There was a diaulos flute I wanted, a double-piper that Bruxieus had promised to teach me coot and grouse calls on.
The proceeds from the eggs would be my bankroll. That double-piper would be my prize.
We set out two hours before dawn, Diomache and I, with two heavy sacks of spring onions and three cheese wheels in cloth loaded on a half-lame female ass named Stumblefoot. Stumblefoot's foal we had left home tied in the barn; that way we could release mama in town when we unloaded, and she would make a beeline on her own, straight home to her baby.
This was the first time I had ever been to market without a gtown-up and the first with a prize of my own to sell. I was excited, too, by being with Diomache. I was not yet ten; she was thirteen.
She seemed a full-grown woman to me, and the prettiest and smartest in all that countryside. I hoped my friends would fall in with us on the road, just to see me on my own beside her.
We had just reached the Akarnanian road when we saw the sun. It was bright flaring yellow, still below the horizon against the purple sky. There was only one problem: it was rising in the north.
That's not the sun, Diomache said, stopping abruptly and jerking hard on Stumblefoot's halter.
That's fire.
It was my father's friend Pierion's farm.
The farm was burning.
We've got to help them, Diomache announced in a voice that brooked no protest, and, clutching my cloth of eggs in one hand, I started after her at a fast trot, hauling the bawling gimpy-foot ass.
How can this happen before fall, Diomache was calling as we ran, the fields aren't tinder-dry yet, look at the flames, they shouldn't be that big.
We saw a second fire. East of Pierion's. Another farm. We pulled up, Diomache and I, in the middle of the road, and then we heard the horses.
The ground beneath our bare feet began to rumble as if from an earthquake. We saw the flare of torches. Cavalry. A full platoon. Thirty-six horses were thundering toward us. We saw armor and crested helmets. I started running toward them, waving in relief. What luck! They would help us!
With thirty-six men, we'd have the fires out in- Diomache yanked me back hard. Those aren't our men.
They came past at a near gallop, looking huge and dark and ferocious. Their shields had been blackened, soot smeared on the blazes and stockings of their horses, their bronze greaves caked with dark mud. In the torchlight I saw the white beneath the soot on their shields. Argives. Our allies. Three riders reined in before us; Stumblefoot bawled in terror and stamped to break;
Diomache held the halter fast.
What you got there, girlie? the burliest of the horsemen demanded, wheeling his lathered, mudmatted mount before the onion sacks and the cheeses. He was a wall of a man, like Ajax, with an open-faced Boeotian helmet and white grease under his eyes for vision in the dark. Night raiders.
He leaned from his saddle and made a lunging swipe for Stumblefoot. Diomache kicked the man's mount, hard in the belly; the beast bawled and spooked.
You're burning our farms, you traitorous bastards!
Diomache slung Stumblefoot's halter free and slapped the fear-stricken ass with all her strength.
The beast ran like hell and so did we.
I have sprinted in battle, racing under arrow and javelin fire with sixty pounds of armor on my back, and countless times in training have I been dtiven up steep broken faces at a dead run. Yet never have my heart and lungs labored with such desperate necessity as they did that terror-filled morning. We left the road at once, fearing more cavalry, and bolted straight across country, streaking for home. We could see other farms burning now. We've got to run faster! Di-omache barked back at me. We had come beyond two miles, nearly three, on our trek toward town, and now had to retrace that distance and more across stony, overgrown hillsides. Brambles tore at us, rocks slashed our bare feet, our hearts seemed like they must burst within our breasts. Dashing across a field, I saw a sight that chilled my blood. Pigs. Three sows and their litters were scurrying in single file across the field toward the woods. They didn't run, it wasn't a panic, just an extremely brisk, well-disciplined fast march. I thought: those porkers will survive this day, while Diomache and I will not.
We saw more cavalry. Another platoon and another, Aetolians of Pleuron and Kalydon. This was worse; it meant the city had been betrayed not just by one ally but by a coalition. I called to Diomache to stop; my heart was about to explode from exertion. I'll leave you, you little shit!
She hauled me forward. Suddenly from the woods burst a man. My uncle Tenagros, Diomache's father. He was in a nightshirt only, clutching a single eight-foot spear. When he saw Diomache, he dropped the weapon and ran to embrace her. They clung to each other, gasping. But this only struck more terror into me. Where's Mother? I could hear Diomache demanding. Tenagros' eyes were wild with grief. Where's my mother? I shouted. Is my father with you?
Dead. All dead.
How do you know? Did you see them?
I saw them and you don't want to.
Tenagros retrieved his spear from the dirt. He was breathless, weeping; he had soiled himself; there was liquid shit on the inside of his thighs. He had always been my favorite uncle; now I hated him with a murderous passion. You ran! I accused him with a boy's heartlessness. You showed your heels, you coward!
Tenagros turned on me with fury. Get to the city! Get behind the walls!
What about Bruxieus? Is he alive?
Tenagros slapped me so hard he bowled me right off my feet. Stupid boy. You care more about a blind slave than your own mother and father.
Diomache hauled me up. I saw in her eyes the same rage and despair. Tenagros saw it too.
What's that in your hands? he barked at me.
I looked down. There were my ptarmigan eggs, still era-died in the rag in my palms.
Tenagros' callused fist smashed down on mine, shattering the fragile shells into goo at my feet.
Get into town, you insolent brats! Get behind the walls!
His Majesty has presided over the sack of numberless cities and has no need to hear recounted the details of the week that followed. I will append the observation only, from the horror-benumbed apprehension of a boy shorn at one blow of mother and father, family, clan, tribe and city, that this was the first time my eyes had beheld those sights which experience teaches are common to all battles and all slaughters.
This I learned then: there is always fire.
An acrid haze hangs in the air night and day, and sulphurous smoke chokes the nostrils. The sun is the color of ash, and black stones Utter the road, smoking. Everywhere one looks, some object is afire. Timber, flesh, the earth itself. Even water burns. The pitilessness of flame reinforces the sensation of the gods' anger, of fate, retribution, deeds done and hell to pay.
All is the obverse of what it had been.
Things are fallen which had stood upright. Things are free which should be bound, and bound which should be free. Things which had been hoarded in secret now blow and tumble in the open, and those who had hoarded them watch with dull eyes and let them go.
Boys have become men and men boys. Slaves now stand free and freemen slaves. Childhood has fled. The knowledge of my mother and father's slaughter struck me less with grief for them or fear for myself than with the imperative to assume at once their station. Where had I been on the morn of their murder? I had failed them, trotting off on my boyish errand. Why had I not foreseen their peril? Why was I not standing at my father's shoulder, armed and possessed of a man's strength, to defend our hearth or die honorably before it, as he and my mother had?
Bodies lay in the road. Mostly men, but women and children too, with the same dark blot of fluid sinking into the pitiless dirt. The living trod past them, grief-riven. Everyone was filthy. Many had no shoes. All were fleeing the slave columns and the roundup which would be starting soon.
Women carried infants, some of them already dead, while other dazed figures glided past like shades, bearing away some pitifully useless possession, a lamp or a volume of verse. In peacetime the wives of the city walked abroad with necklaces, anklets, rings; now one saw none, or it was secreted somewhere to pay a ferryman's toll or purchase a heel of stale bread. We encountered people we knew and didn't recognize them. They didn't recognize us. Numb reunions were held along roadsides or in copses, and news was traded of the dead and the soon to be dead.
Most piteous of all were the animals. I saw a dog on tire that first morning and ran to snuff his smoking fur with my cloak. He fled, of course; I couldn't catch him, and Diomache snatched me back with a curse for my foolishness. That dog was the first of many. Horses hamstrung by sword blades, lying on their flanks with their eyes pools of numb horror. Mules with entrails spilling; oxen with javelins in their sides, lowing pitifully yet too terrified to let anyone near to help. These were the most heartbreaking: the poor dumb beasts whose torment was made more pitiful by their lack of faculty to understand it.
Feast day had come for crows and ravens. They went for the eyes first. They peck a man's asshole out, though God only knows why. People chased them off at first, rushing indignantly at the blandly feeding scavengers, who would retreat as far only as necessity dictated, then hop back to the banquet when the coast was clear. Piety demanded that we bury our fallen countrymen, but fear of enemy cavalry pushed us on. Sometimes bodies would be dragged into a ditch and a few pitiful handfuls of dirt cast over them, accompanied by a miserable prayer. The crows got so fat they could barely fly a foot off the ground.
We did not go into the city, Diomache and I.
We had been betrayed from within, she instructed me, speaking slowly as one would to a simpleton, to make sure I understood. Sold out by our own citizens, some faction seeking power, then they themselves had been double-crossed by the Argives. Astakos was a port, a poor one, but a western harbor nonetheless, which Argos had long coveted. Now she had it.
We found Bruxieus on the morn of the second day. His slave brand had saved him. That, and his blindness, which the conquerors mocked even as he cursed and swung at them with his staff.
You're free, old man! Free to starve or beg from his belly's necessity for the victor's yoke.
The rain came that evening. This, too, seems a constant coda to slaughter. What had been ash was now gray mud, and the stripped bodies which had not been reclaimed by sons and mothers now glistened a ghastly white, cleansed by the gods in their remorseless way.
Our city no longer existed. Not alone the physical site, the citizens, the walls and farms. But the very spirit of our nation, the polis itself, that ideal of mind called Astakos that, yes, had been smaller than a deme of Athens or Corinth or Thebes, that, yes, had been poorer than Megara or Epidauros or Olympia, but that existed as a city nonetheless. Our city, my city. Now it was effaced utterly. We who called ourselves Astakiots were effaced with it. Without a city, who were we? What were we?
A dislocation of the faculties seemed to unman all. No one could think. A numb shock possessed our hearts. Life had become like a play, a tragedy one had seen enacted on the stage-the fall of Ilium, the sack of Thebes. Only now it was real, performed by actors of flesh and blood, and those actors were ourselves.
East of the Field of Ares, where the fallen in battle were buried, we came upon a man digging a grave for an infant. The baby, wrapped in the man's cloak, lay like a grocer's bundle at the edge of the pit. He asked me to hand it down to him. He was afraid the wolves would get it, he said, that's why he had dug the hole so deep. He didn't know the child's name. A woman had handed it to him during the flight from the city. He had carried the babe for two days; on the third morning it died. Bruxieus wouldn't let me hand the little body down; it was bad luck, he said, for a living young spirit to handle a dead one. He did it himself. We recognized the man now. He was a mathematikos, a tutor of arithmetic and geometry, from the city. His wife and daughter emerged from the woods; we realized they had been hiding till they knew we brought no harm. They had all lost their minds. Bruxieus had instructed Diomache and me in the signs. Madness was contagious, we must not linger.
We needed Spartans, the teacher declared, speaking softly behind his sad watery eyes. Just fifty would have saved the city. Bruxieus was nudging us to go.
See how numb we are? the man continued. We glide about in a daze, disconnected from our reason. You'll never see Spartans in such a state. This-he gestured to the blackened landscape -is their element. They move through these horrors with clear eyes and unshaken limbs. And they hate the Argives. They are their bitterest enemies.
Bruxieus pulled us away.
Fifty of them! the man still shouted, while his wife struggled to tug him back to the safety of the trees. Five! One would have saved us!
We recovered Diomache's mother's body, and my mother's and father's, on the eve of the third day. A squad of Argive infantry had set up camp around the gutted ruins of our farmhouse.
Already surveyors and claims markers had arrived from the conquering cities. We watched, hidden, from the woods as the officials marked off the parcels with their measuring rods and scrawled upon the white wall of my mother's kitchen garden a sign of the clan of Argos whose lands ours would now become.
An Argive taking a piss spotted us. We took to flight but he called after us. Something in his voice convinced us that he and the others intended no harm. They had had enough of blood for now. They waved us in, gave us the bodies. I sponged the mud and blood off my mother's corpse, using the singlet she had made for me, for my promised passage to Ithaka. Her flesh was like cold wax. I did not weep, neither shrouding her form in the burial robe she had woven with her own hands and which in its cupboard chest remained miraculously unstolen, nor interring her bones and my father's beneath the stone that bore our ancestors' blazon and sigma.
It was my place to know the rites, but I had not been taught them, awaiting my initiation to the tribe when I turned twelve. Diomache lit the flame, and the Argives sang the paean, the only sacred song any of them knew.
Zeus Savior, spare us Who march into your fire Grant us courage to stand ShieU'to-shieU with our brothers Beneath your mighty aegis We advance Lord of the Thunder Our Hope and our Protector When the hymn was over, the men raped her.
I didn't understand at first what they intended. I thought she had violated some portion of the rite and they were going to beat her for it. A soldier snatched me by the scalp, one hairy forearm around my neck to snap it. Bruxieus found a spear at his throat and the point of a sword pricking the flesh of his back. No one said a word. There were six of them, armorless, in sweat-dark corselets with their rank dirty beards and the rain-sodden hair on their chests and calves coarse and matted and filthy. They had been watching Diomache, her smooth girl's legs and the start of breasts beneath her tunic.
Don't harm them, Diomache said simply, meaning Bruxieus and me.
Two men took her away behind the garden wall. They finished, then two more followed, and the last pair after that. When it was over, the sword was lowered from Bruxieus' back, and he crossed to carry Diomache away in His arms. She wouldn't let him. She stood to her feet on her own, though she had to brace herself against the wall to do it, both her thighs dark with blood. The Argives gave us a quarter* skin of wine and we took it.
It was clear now that Diomache could not walk. Bruxieus took her up in his arms. Another of the Argives pressed a hard bread into my hands. Two more regiments will be coming from the south tomorrow. Get into the mountains and go north, don't come down till you're out of Akarnania.
He spoke kindly, as if to his own son. If you find a town, don't bring the girl in or this will happen again.
I turned and spat on his dark stinking tunic, a gesture of powerlessness and despair. He caught my arm as I turned away. And get rid of that old man. He's worthless. He'll only wind up getting you and the girl killed.
They say that ghosts sometimes, those that cannot let go their bond to the living, linger and haunt the scenes of their days under the sun, hovering like substanceless birds of carrion, refusing Hades' command to retire beneath the earth. That is how we lived, Bruxieus, Diomache and I, in the weeks following the sack of our city. For a month and more, for most of that summer we could not quit our vacated polis. We roamed the wild country above the agrotera, the marginal wastes surrounding the cropland, sleeping in the day when it was warm, moving at night like the shades we were. From the ridgeUnes we watched the Argives move in below, repopulating our groves and farmsteads with the excess of their citizenry.
Diomache was not the same. She would wander away by herself, into the dark glades, and do unspeakable things to her womanly parts. She was trying to dispatch the child that might be growing inside her. She thinks she has given offense to the god Hymen, Bruxieus explained to me when I broke in upon her one day and she chased me with curses and a hail of stones. She fears that she may never be a man's wife now but only a slave or a whore. I have tried to tell her this is foolishness, but she will not hear it, coming from a man.
There were many others like us in the hills then. We would run into them at the springs and try to resume the fellow-feeling we had shared as Astakiots. But the extinction of our polis had severed those happy bonds forever. It was every man for himself now; every clan, every kin group.
Some boys I knew had formed a gang. There were eleven of them, none more than two years older than I, and they were holy terrors. They carried arms and boasted that they had killed grown men. They beat me up one day when I refused to join them. I wanted to, but couldn't leave Diomache. They would have taken her in too, but I knew she would never go near them.
This is our country, their boy-lord warned me, a beast of twelve who called himself Sphaireus, Ball Player, because he had stuffed in hide the skull of an Argive he had slain, and now kicked about with him the way a monarch bears a skeptron. He meant his gang's country, the high ground above the city, beyond the reach of Argive armor. If we catch you trespassing here again, you or your cousin or that slave, we'll cut out your liver and feed it to the dogs.
At last in fall we put our city behind us. In September when Boreas, the North Wind, begins to blow. Without Bruxieus and his knowledge of roots and snares, we would have starved.
Before, on my father's farm, we had caught wild birds for our cote, or to make breeding pairs, or just to hold for an hour before returning them to freedom. Now we ate them. Bruxieus made us devour everything but the feathers. We crunched the little hollow bones; we ate the eyes, and the legs right down to the boot, discarding only the beak and the unchewable feet. We gulped eggs raw. We choked down worms and slugs. We wolfed grubs and beetles and fought over the last lizards and snakes before the cold drove them underground for good. We gnawed so much fennel that to this day I gag at a whiff of that anisey smell, even a pinch flavoring a stew. Diomache grew thin as a reed.
Why won't you talk to me anymore? I asked her one night as we tramped across some stony hillside. Can't I put my head in your lap like we used to?
She began to cry and would not answer me. I had made myself an infantryman's spear, stout ash and fire-hardened, no longer a boy's toy but a weapon meant to kill. Visions of revenge fed my heart. I would live among the Spartans. I would slay Argives one day. I practiced the way I had seen our warriors do, advancing as if on line, an imaginary shield before me at high port, my spear gripped strong above the right shoulder, poised for the overhand strike. I looked up one dusk and there stood my cousin, observing me coldly. You will be like them, she said, when you grow. She meant the soldiers who had shamed her. I will not!
You will be a man. You won't be able to help yourself. One night when we had tramped for hours, Bruxieus inquired of Diomache why she had held herself so silent. He was concerned for the dark thoughts that might be poisoning her mind. She refused to speak at first. Then, at last relenting, told us in a sweet sad voice of her wedding, She had been planning it in her head all night. What dress she would wear, what style of garland, which goddess she would dedicate her sacrifice to. She had been thinking for hours, she told us, of her slippers. She had all the strapping and bead-work worked out in her mind. They would be so beautiful, her bridal slippers!
Then her eyes clouded and she looked away. This shows what a fool I have become. No one will marry me.
I will, I proffered at once. She laughed. You? A fair chance of that! Foolish as it sounds to recount, to my boy's heart these careless words stung like no others in my life. I vowed that I would marry Diomache one day. I would be man enough and warrior enough to protect her.
For a time in autumn we tried surviving on the seacoast, sleeping in caves and combing the sloughs and marshes. You could eat there at least. There were shellfish and crabs, mussels and spinebacks to be prised from rocks; we learned how to take gulls on the wing with stakes and nets. But the exposure was brutal as winter came on. Bruxieus began to suffer. He would never let his weakness show to Diomache and me when he thought we were looking, but I would watch his face sometimes when he slept. He looked seventy. The elements were hard on him in his years; all the old wounds ached, but more than that he was donating his substance to preserve ours, Diomache's and mine. Sometimes I would catch him looking at me, studying a tilt to my face or the tone of something I had said. He was making sure I hadn't gone crazy or feral.
As the cold came on, it became more difficult to find food. We must beg. Bruxieus would pick out an isolated farmstead and approach the gate alone; the hounds would converge in a clamorous pack and the men of the farm would emerge, on guard, from the fields or from some rude falling-down outbuilding; brothers and a father, their callused hands resting on the tools which would become weapons if the need arose. The hills were infested with outlaws then; the farmers never knew who would walk up to their gate and with what duplicitous intent. Bruxieus would doff his cap and wait for the woman of the house, making sure she took note of his milky eyes and beaten posture. He would indicate Diomache and me, shivering miserably in the road, and ask the mistress not for food, which would have made us beggars in the landsmen's eyes and prompted them loosing the dogs on us, but for any broken item of use that she could spare – a rake, a thrashing staff, a worn-out cloak, something we could repair and sell in the next town. He made sure to ask directions and appear eager to be moving on. That way they knew any kindness would not make us linger. Almost always the farm wives volunteered a meal, sometimes inviting us in to hear what news we bore from foreign places and to tell us their own.
It was during one of those forlorn feedings that I first heard the word Sepeia. This is a place of Argos, a wooded area near Tiryns, where a battle had just been fought between the Argives and the Spartans. The boy who bore this tale was a farmer's visiting nephew, a mute, who communicated through signs and whom even his own family could barely comprehend. The Spartans under King Kleomenes, the boy gave us to understand, had achieved a spectacular victory. Two thousand Argives dead was one figure he had heard, though others had it at four thousand and even six. My heart exploded with joy. How I wished I could have been there! To have been a man grown, advancing in that battle line, mowing down in fair fight the men of Argos, as they had cut down by perfidy my own mother and father.
The Spartans became for me the equivalent of avenging gods. I couldn't leam enough about these warriors who bad so devastatingly defeated the murderers of my mother and father, the violators of my innocent cousin. No stranger we met escaped my boyish grilling. Tell me about Sparta.
Her double kings. The three hundred Knights who protected them. The agoge which trained the city's youth. The syssiria, the warriors' messes. We heard a tale of Kleomenes. Someone had asked the king why he did not raze Argos once and for all when his army had stood at the gates and the city lay prostate before him. We need the Argives, Kleomenes responded. Who else will our young men train on?
In the winter hills we were starving. Bruxieus was getting weaker. I took to stealing. Diomache and I would raid a shepherd's fold at night, fighting off the dogs with sticks and snatching a kid if we could. Most of the shepherds carried bows; arrows would whiz past us in the dark. We stopped to grab them and soon had quite a cache. Bruxieus hated to see us turning into thieves.
We got a bow one time, snagging it right out from under a sleeping goatherd's nose. It was a man's weapon, a Thessalian cavalry bow, so stout that neither Diomache nor I could draw it.
Then came the event which changed my life and set it on the course that reached its terminus at the Hot Gates.
I got caught stealing a goose. She was a fat prize, her wings pegged for market, and I got careless going over a wall. The dogs got me. The men of the farm dragged me into the mud of the livestock pen and nailed me to a hide boatd the size of a door, driving tanning spikes through both my palms. I was on my back, screaming in agony, while the farm men lashed my kicking, flailing legs to the board, vowing that after lunch they would castrate me like a sheep and hang my testicles upon the gate as a warning to other thieves. Diomache and Bruxieus crouched, hidden, up the hillside; they could hear everything… ere the captive drew up in his narration. Fatigue and the I ordeal of his wounds had taken severe toll of the man, or perhaps, his listeners imagined, it was memory of the instance he was recounting. His Majesty, through the captain Orontes, inquired of the prisoner if he required attention. The man declined. The hesitation in the tale, he declared, arose not from any incapacity of its narrator, but at the prompting of the god by whose inner direction the order of events was being dictated, and who now commanded a momentary alteration of tack. The man Xe-ones resettled himself and, granted permission to wet his throat with wine, resumed.
Two summers subsequent to this incident, in Lakedaemon, I witnessed a different kind of ordeal: a Spartan boy beaten to death by his drill instructors.
The lad's name was Teriander, he was fourteen; they called him Tripod because no one of his age-class could take him down in wrestling. Over the succeeding years I looked on in attendance as two dozen other boys succumbed beneath this same trial, each like Tripod disdaining so much as a whimper in pain, but he, this lad, was the first.
The whippings are a ritual of the boys' training in Lakedaemon, not in punishment for stealing food (at which exploit the boys are encouraged to excel, to develop resourcefulness in war), but for the crime of getting caught. The beatings take place alongside the Temple of Artemis Orthia in a narrow alley called the Runway. The site is beneath plane trees, a shaded and quite pleasant space in less grisly circumstances.
Tripod was the eleventh boy whipped that day. The two eirenes, drill instructors, who administered the beatings, had already been replaced by a fresh pair, twenty-year-olds just out of the agoge and as powerfully built as any youths in the city. It worked like this: the boy whose turn it was grasped a horizontal iron bar secured to the bases of two trees (the bar had been worn smooth by decades, some said centuries, of the ritual) and was flogged with birch rods, as big around as a man's thumb, by the eirenes taking turns. A priestess of Artemis stood at the boy's shoulder, presenting an ancient wooden image which must, tradition dictated, receive the spray of human blood.
Two of the boy's mates from his training platoon kneel at each shoulder to catch the lad when he falls. At any time the boy may terminate the ordeal by releasing the bar and pitching forward to the dirt. Theoretically a boy would only do this when thrashed to unconsciousness, but many pitched simply when they could no longer bear the pain. Between a hundred and two hundred looked on this day: boys of other platoons, fathers, brothers and mentors and even some of the boys' mothers, keeping discreetly to the rear.
Tripod kept taking it and taking it. The flesh of his back had been torn through in a dozen places; you could see tissue and fascia, rib cage and muscle and even the spine. He would not go down.
Pitch! his two comrades kept urging between blows, meaning let go of the bar and fall. Tripod refused.
Even the drill instructors began hissing this between their teeth. One look in the boy's face and you could see he had passed beyond reason. He had made up his mind to die rather than raise the hand for quarter. The eirenes did as they were instructed in such cases: they prepared to wallop Tripod so hard in four rapid successive blows that the impact would knock him unconscious and thus preserve his life. I will never forget the sound those four blows made upon the boy's back.
Tripod dropped; the drill instructors immediately declared the ordeal terminated and summoned the next boy.
Tripod managed to lift himself upon all fours. Blood was sheeting from his mouth, nose and ears.
He could not see or speak. He managed somehow to turn about and almost stand, then he sank slowly to his seat, held there a moment and then dropped, hard, into the dirt. It was clear at once that he would never rise.
Later that evening when it was over (the ritual was not suspended on account of Tripod's death but continued for another three hours), Dienekes, who had been present, walked apart with his protege, the boy Alexandras whom I mentioned earlier. I served Alexandros at this time. He was twelve but looked no older than ten; already he was a won' derful runner, but extremely slight and of a sensitive disposition. Moreover he had shared a bond of affection with Tripod; the older boy had been a sort of guardian or protector; Alexandros was devastated by his death.
Dienekes walked with Alexandras, alone except for his own squire and myself, to a spot beneath the temple of Athena Protectress of the City, immediately below the slope from the statue of Phobos, the god of fear. At that time Dienekes' age was, I would estimate, thirty-five years. He had already won two prizes of valor, at Erythrae against the Thebans and at Achillieon against the Corinthians and their Arkadian allies. As nearly as I can recall, this is how the older man instructed his protege: First, in a gentle and loving tone, he recalled his own first sight, when he was a lad in years younger even than Alexandros, of a boy comrade whipped to death. He recounted several of his own ordeals in the Runway, beneath the rod.
Then he began the sequence of query and response which comprises the Lakedaemonian syllabus of instruction.
Answer this, Alexandros. When our countrymen triumph in battle, what is it that defeats the foe?
The boy responded in the terse Spartan style, Our steel and our skill.
These, yes, Dienekes corrected him gently, but something more. It is that. His gesture led up the slope to the image of Phobos.
Fear.
Their own fear defeats our enemies.
Now answer. What is the source of fear?
When Alexandros I reply faltered, Dienekes reached with his hand and touched his own chest and shoulder.
Fear arises from this: the flesh. This, he declared, is the factory of fear.
Alexandros listened with the grim concentration of a boy who knows his whole life will be war; that the laws of Lykurgus forbid him and every other Spartan to know or pursue a trade other than war; that his term of obligation extends from age twenty to age sixty, and that no force under heaven will excuse him from soon, very soon, assuming his place in line of battle and clashing shield-to-shield, helmet-to-helmet with the enemy.
Now answer again, Alexandros. Did you observe today in the manner of the eirenes delivering the beating any sign or indication of malice?
The boy answered no.
Would you characterize their demeanor as barbarous? Did they take pleasure in dealing agony to Tripod?
No.
Was their intention to crush his will or break his spirit?
No.
What was their intention?
To harden his mind against pain.
Throughout this conversation the older man maintained a voice tender and solicitous with love.
Nothing Alexandros could do would ever make this voice love him less or abandon him. Such is the peculiar genius of the Spartan system of pairing each boy in training with a mentor other than his own father. A mentor may say things that a father cannot; a boy can confess to his mentor that which would bring shame to reveal to his father.
It was bad today, wasn't it, my young friend?
Dienekes then asked the boy how he imagined battle, real battle, compared with what he had witnessed today. No answer was required or expected.
Never forget, Alexandros, that this flesh, this body, does not belong to us. Thank God it doesn't.
If I thought this stuff was mine, I could not advance a pace into the face of the enemy. But it is not ours, my friend. It belongs to the gods and to our children, our fathers and mothers and those of Lakedaemon a hundred, a thousand years yet unborn. It belongs to the city which gives us all we have and demands no less in requital.
Man and boy moved on, down the slope to the river. They followed the path to that grove of double-boled myrtle called the Twins, sacred to the sons of Tyndareus and to the family to which Alexandros belonged. It would be to this spot, on the night of his final ordeal and initiation, that he would repair, alone save his mother and sisters, to receive the salve and sanction of the gods of his line.
Dienekes sat upon the earth beneath the Twins. He gestured to Alexandros to take the place beside him.
Personally I think your friend Tripod was foolish. What he displayed today contained more of recklessness than true courage, andreia. He cost the city his life, which could have been spent more fruitfully in battle.
Nonetheless it was clear Dienekes respected him.
But to his credit he showed us something of nobility today. He showed you and every boy watching what it is to pass beyond identification with the body, beyond pain, beyond fear of death. You were horrified to behold his agonisma, but it was awe that struck you truly, wasn't it?
Awe of that boy or whatever daimon animated him. Your friend Tripod showed us contempt for this. Again Dienekes indicated the flesh. A contempt which approached the stature of the sublime.
From my spot, above on the bank, I could see the boy's shoulders shudder as the grief and terror of the day at last purged themselves from his heart. Dienekes embraced and comforted him.
When at last the boy had recomposed himself, his mentor gently released him.
Have your instructors taught you why the Spartans excuse without penalty the warrior who loses his helmet or breastplate in battle, but punish with loss of all citizenship rights the man who discards his shield?
They had, Alexandras replied.
Because a warrior carries helmet and breastplate for his own protection, but his shield for the safety of the whole line.
Dienekes smiled and placed a hand upon his protege's shoulder.
Remember this, my young friend. There is a force beyond fear. More powerful than selfpreservation. You glimpsed it today, in a crude and unself-aware form, yes. But it was there and it was genuine. Let us remember your friend Tripod and honor him for this.
I was screaming upon the hide board. I could hear my cries bounce off the walls of the livestock enclosure and shriek off, multiplied, up the hillsides. I knew it was disgraceful but I could not stop.
I begged the farm men to release me, to end my agony. I would do anything, and I described it all at the top of my lungs. I cried out to the gods in a shameful little boy's voice piping up the mountainside. I knew Bruxieus could hear me. Would his love for me impel him to dash in and be nailed alongside me? I didn't care. I wanted the pain to end. I begged the men to kill me. I could feel the bones in both hands shattered by the spikes. I would never hold a spear or even a gardening spade. I would be a cripple, a clubfist. My life was over and in the meanest, most dishonorable way.
A fist shattered my cheek. Shut your pipehole, you sniveling little shitworm! The men set the tanning board upright, angled against a wall, and there I squirmed, impaled, for the sun's endless crawl across the sky. Urchins from the up-valley farms clustered to watch me scream. The girls tore my rags and poked at my privates; the boys pissed on me. Dogs snuffed my bare soles, emboldening themselves to make a meal of me. I only stopped wailing when my throat could cry no longer. I was trying to tear my palms free right through the spikes, but the men lashed my wrists tighter so I couldn't move. How does that feel, you fucking thief? Let's see you pick off another prize, you night'creeping little rat.
When at last their own growling bellies drove my tormentors indoors for supper, Diomache slipped down from the hill and cut me free. The spikes would not come out of my palms; she had to blade the wood off the frame with her dagger. My hands came away with the tanning nails still through them. Bruxieus carried me off, as he had borne Diomache earlier, after her violation.
Oh God, my cousin said when she saw my hands.
The winter, Bruxieus said, was the coldest he could re-I member. Sheep froze in the high pastures.
Twenty-foot drifts sealed the passes. Deer were driven so desperate with hunger that they straggled down, skeleton-thin and blind from starvation, all the way to the shepherds' winter folds, where they presented themselves for slaughter, point-blank before the herdsmen's bows.
We stayed in the mountains, so high up that martens' and foxes' fur grew white as the snow. We slept in dugouts that shepherds had abandoned or in ice caves we chopped out with stone axes, lining their floors with pine boughs and huddling together beneath our triple cloaks in a pile like puppies. I begged Bruxieus and Diomache to abandon me, let me die in peace in the cold. They insisted that I allow them to carry me down to a town, to a physician. I refused absolutely. Never again would I place myself before a stranger, any stranger, without a weapon in my hand. Did Bruxieus imagine that doctors possessed a more exalted sense of honor than other men? What payment would some hill-town quack demand? What profitable turn would he discover in a slave and a crippled boy? What use would he make of a starving thirteen-year-old girl?
I had another reason for refusing to go to a town. I hated myself for the shameless way I had cried out, and could not make myself stop, during the hours I was put to the trial. I had seen my own heart and it was the heart of a coward. I despised myself with a blistering, pitiless scorn. The tales I had cherished of the Spartans only made me loathe myself more. None of them would beg for his life as I had, absent every scrap of dignity. The dishonor of my parents' murder continued to torment me. Where was I in their hour of desperation? I was not there when they needed me.
In my mind I imagined their slaughter again and again, and always myself absent. I wanted to die. The only thought that lent me solace was the certainty that I would die, soon, and thereby exit this hell of my own dishonored existence.
Bruxieus intuited these thoughts and tried in his gentle way to disarm them. I was only a child, he told me. What prodigies of valor could be expected from a lad of ten? Boys are men at ten in Sparta, I declared.
This was the first and only time I saw Bruxieus truly, physically angry. He seized me by both shoulders and shook me violently, commanding me to face him. Listen to me, boy. Only gods and heroes can be brave in isolation. A man may call upon courage only one way, in the ranks with his brothers-in-arms, the line of his tribe and his city. Most piteous of all states under heaven is that of a man alone, bereft of the gods of his home and his poll's. A man without a city is not a man. He is a shadow, a shell, a joke and a mockery. That is what you have become now, my poor Xeo. No one may expect valor from one cast out alone, cut off from the gods of his home.
He drew up then; his eyes broke away in sorrow. I saw the slave brand upon his brow. I understood. Such was the state he had endured, all these years, in the house of my father. But you have acted the man, little old uncle, I said, employing the fondest Astakiot term of affection. How have you done it?
He looked at me with sad, gentle eyes. The love I might have given my own children, I gave to you, little nephew.
That was my answer to the unknowable ways of God. But it seems the Argives are dearer to Him than I. He has let them rob me of my life not once, but twice.
These words, intended to bring comfort, only reinforced further my resolve to die. My hands had swollen now to twice their normal size. Pus and poison oozed from them, then froze in a hideous icy mass that I had to chip away each morning to reveal the mangled flesh beneath. Bruxieus did everything he could with salves and poultices, but it was no use. Both central metacarpals had been shattered in my right hand. I could not close the fingers nor form a fist. I would never hold a spear nor grip a sword. Diomache sought to comfort me by equating my ruin to hers. I scorned her bitterly. You can still be a woman. What can I do? How can I ever take my place in the line of battle?
At night, bouts of fever alternated with fits of teeth-rattling ague. I curled contorted in Diomache's arms, with BruxieusI bulk enwrapping us both for warmth. I called out again and again to the gods but received no whisper in reply. They had abandoned us, it was clear, now that we no longer possessed ourselves or were possessed by our polis.
One fever-racked night, perhaps ten days after the incident at the farmstead, Diomache and Bruxieus wrapped me in skins and set off foraging. It had begun to snow and they hoped to use the silence, perhaps with luck to take unawares a hare or a gone-to-ground covey of grouse.
This was my chance. I resolved to take it. I waited till Bruxieus and Diomache had moved off beyond sight and sound. Leaving cloak and furs and foot wraps behind for them, I set out barefoot into the storm.
I climbed for what seemed like hours but was probably no more than five minutes. The fever had me in its grip. I was blind like the deer, yet guided by an infallible sense of direction. I found a place amid a stand of pines and knew this was my spot. A profound sense of decorum possessed me. I wanted to do this properly and, above all, to be no trouble to Bruxieus and Diomache.
I picked out a tree and settled my back against it so that its spirit, which touched both earth and sky, would conduct mine safely out of this world. Yes, this was the tree. I could feel Sleep, brother of Death, advancing up from the toes. Feeling ebbed from my loins and midsection.
When the numbness reaches the heart, I imagined, I will pass over. Then a terrifying thought struck me.
What if this is the wrong tree? Perhaps I should be lean-ing against that one. Or that other, over there. A panic of indecision seized me. I was in the wrong spot! I had to get up but could no longer command my limbs to move. I groaned. I was failing even in my own death. Just as my panic and despair reached their apex, I was startled to discover a man standing directly above me in the grove!
My first thought was that he could help me move. He could advise me. Help me decide. Together we would pick out the correct tree and he would place my back against it. From some part of my mind the numb thought arose: what is a man doing up here at this hour, in this storm?
I blinked and tried with all my failing power to focus. No, this was not a dream. Whoever this was, he was really here. The thought came foggily that he must be a god. It occurred to me that I was acting impiously toward him. I was giving offense. Surely propriety demanded that I respond with terror or awe, or prostrate myself before him. Yet something in his posture, which was not grave but oddly whimsical, seemed to say, Don't give yourself the bother. I accepted this. It seemed to please him. I knew he was going to speak, and that whatever words came forth would be of paramount importance for me, in this my earthly life or the life I was about to pass into. I must listen with all my faculties and forget nothing. His eyes met mine with a gentle, amused kindness. I have always found the spear to be, he spoke with a quiet majesty that could be nothing other than the voice of a god, a rather inelegant weapon.
What a queer thing to say, I thought.
And why inelegant? I had the sense that the word was absolutely deliberate, the one precise term the god sought. It seemed to carry significance for him in level upon level, though I myself had no idea what this meaning could be. Then I saw the silver bow slung over his shoulder.
The Archer.
Apollo Far Striker.
In a flash that was neither thunderbolt nor revelation but the plainest, least adorned apprehension in the world, I understood all that his words and presence implied. I knew what he meant, and what I must do.
My right hand. Its severed sinews would never produce the warrior's grasp upon the shank of a spear. But its forefingers could catch and draw the twined gut of a bowstring. My left, though ever denied power to close upon the gripcord of a hopbn shield, could yet hold stable the handpiece of a bow and extend it to full stretch.
The bow.
The bow would preserve me.
The Archer's eyes probed mine, gently, for one final instant. Had I understood? His glance seemed to inquire not so much Will you now serve me? as to confirm the fact, unknown to me heretofore, that I had been in his service all my life.
I felt warmth returning to my midsection and the blood surging like a tide into my legs and feet. I heard my name being called from below and knew it was my cousin, she and Bruxieus in alarm, scouring the hillside for me.
Diomache reached me, scrabbling over the snowy crest and lurching into the grove of pines.
What are you doing up here all alone? I could feel her slapping my cheeks, hard, as if to bring me around from a vision or transport; she was crying, clutching and hugging me, tearing off her cloak to wrap about me. She called back to Bruxieus, who in his blindness was clambering as fast as he could up the slope below.
I'm all right, I heard my voice assuring her. She slapped me again and then, weeping, cursed me for being such a fool and scaring them so to death. It's all right, Dio, I heard my voice repeating. I'm all right.
I beg His Majesty's patience with this recounting of the events following the sack of a city of which he has never heard, an obscure polis without fame, spawner of no hero of legend, without link to the greater events of the present war and of the battle which His Majesty's forces fought with the Spartans and their allies at the pass of Thermopylae.
My intent is simply to convey, through the experiences of two children and a slave, some poor measure of the soul terror and devastation which a vanquished population, any population, is forced to endure in the hour of its nation's extinction. For though His Majesty has commanded the sack of empires, yet, if one may speak plainly, he has witnessed the sufferings of their peoples only at a remove, from atop a purple throne or mounted on a caparisoned stallion, protected by the gold-pommeled spears of his royal guard.
Over the following decade more than six score battles, campaigns and wars were fought between and among the cities of Greece. At least forty poleis, including such in-pregnably founded citadels as Knidos, Arethusa, Kolonaia, Amphissa and Metropolis, were sacked in whole or in part. Numberless farms were torched, temples burned, warships sunk, men-at-arms slaughtered, wives and daughters carried off into slavery. No Hellene, however mighty his city, could state with certainty that even one season hence he would still find himself above the earth, with his head still upon his shoulders and his wife and children slumbering in safety by his side. This state of affairs was unexceptional, neither better nor worse than any era in a thousand years, back to Achilles and Hektor, Theseus and Herakles, to the birth of the gods themselves. Business as usual, as the emporoi, the merchants, say.
Each man of Greece knew what defeat in war meant and knew that sooner or later that bitter broth would complete its circuit of the table and settle at last before his own place.
Suddenly, with the rise of His Majesty in Asia, it seemed that hour would be sooner.
Terror of the sack spread throughout all Greece as word began coming, from the lips of too many to be disbelieved, of the scale of His Majesty's mobilization in the East and his intent to put all Hellas to the torch.
So all-pervasive was this dread that it had even been given a name.
Phobos.
The Fear.
Fear of you, Your Majesty. Terror of the wrath of Xerxes son of Darius, Great King of the Eastern Empire, Lord of all men from the rising to the setting sun, and the myriads all Greece knew were on the march beneath his banner to enslave us. Ten years had passed since the sack of my own city, yet the terror of that season lived on, indelible, within me. I was nineteen now.
Events which will in their course be related had parted me from my cousin and from Bruxieus and carried me, as was my wish, to Lakedaemon and there, after a time, into the service of my master, Dienekes of Sparta. In this capacity I was dispatched (myself and a trio of other squires) in attendance upon him and three other Spartiate envoys- Olympieus, Polynikes and Aristodemos-to the island of Rhodes, a possession of His Majesty's empire. It was there that these warriors, and I myself, glimpsed for the first time a fraction of the armored might of Persia.
The ships came first. I had been given the afternoon free and, making use of the time to learn what I could of the island, had attached myself to a company of Rhodian slingers in their practice. I watched as these ebullient fellows hurled with astonishing velocity their lead sling bullets thrice the size of a man's thumb. They could drill these murderous projectiles through half-inch pine planks at a hundred paces and strike a target the size of a man's chest three times out of four. One among them, a youth my own age, was showing me how the slingers carved with their dagger points into the soft lead of their bullets whimsical greetings-Eat this or Love and kisses-when another of the platoon looked up and pointed out to the horizon, toward Egypt.
We saw sails, perhaps a squadron, at least an hour out. The slingers forgot them and continued their drill. What seemed like moments later, the same fellow sang out again, this time with startlement and awe. All drew up and stared. Here came the squadron, triple-bankers with their sails brailed up for speed, already turning the cape and bearing fast upon the breakwater. None had ever seen vessels of such size moving so fast. They must be skimmers, someone said. Racing shells. No full-size ship, and certainly no man-of-war, could slice the water at speeds like that.
But they were warships. Tyrian triremes so tight to the surface that the swells seemed to crest no more than a hand-breadth beneath their thalamites' benches. They were racing each other for sport beneath His Majesty's banner. Training for Greece. For war. For the day their bronzesheathed rams would send the navies of Hellas to the bottom.
That evening Dienekes and the other envoys made their way on foot to the harbor at Lindos. The warships were drawn up upon the strand, within a perimeter manned by Egyptian marines. These recognized the Spartans by their scarlet cloaks and long hair. A wry scene ensued. The captain of the marines motioned the Spartiates forward, calling them forth with a smile from the throng who had assembled to gawk at the vessels and taking them through a full inspecting admiral's tour.
The men speculated, through an interpreter, about how soon they would be at war with each other, and whether fate would bring them again face-to-face across the line of slaughter.
The Egyptian marines were the tallest men I had ever seen and burned nearly black by the sun of their desert land. They were under arms, in doeskin boots, with bronze fish-scale cuirasses and ostrich-plume helmets detailed with gold. Their weapons were the pike and scimitar. They were in high spirits, these marines, comparing the muscles of their buttocks and thighs with those of the Spartans, while each laughed in his tongue unintelligible to the other.
Pleased to meet you, you hyena-jawed bastards. Dienekes grinned at the captain, speaking in Doric and clapping the fellow warmly upon the shoulder. I'm looking forward to carving your balls and sending them home in a basket. The Egyptian laughed uncomprehending and replied, beaming, with some foreign-tongued insult no doubt equally menacing and obscene. Dienekes asked the captain's name, which the man replied was Ptammitechus. The Spartan tongue was defeated by this and settled upon 'Tommie, which seemed to please the officer just as well. He was asked how many more warships like these the Great King numbered in his navy. Sixty came the translated response.
Sixty ships? asked Aristodemos.
The Egyptian loosed a brilliant smile. Sixty squadrons.
The marines conducted the Spartans upon a more detailed examination of the warships, which, hauled up on the sand, had been canted onto careening beams, exposing the undersides of their hulls for cleaning and sealing, which chores the Tyrian seamen were now enthusiastically performing. I smelled wax. The sailors were greasing the boats' bellies for speed. The vessels' planks were butted end-to-end with mortise-and-tenon joinery of such precision that it seemed the work not of shipwrights, but of master cabinetmakers. The conjoining plates between the ram and the hull were glazed with speed-enhancing ceramic and waxed with some kind of naphthabased oil which the mariners applied molten, with paddles. Alongside these speedsters, the Spartan state galley Orthia looked like a garbage scow. But the items which commanded the most animated attention bore no bearing to concerns of the sea.
These were the mail loincloths worn by the marines to protect their private parts.
What are these, diapers? Dienekes inquired, laughing and tugging at the hem of the captain's corselet.
Be careful, my friend, the marine responded with a mock-theatric gesture, I have heard about you Greeks!
The Egyptian inquired of the Spartans why they wore their hair so long. Olympieus replied, quoting the lawmaker Lykurgus, Because no other adornment makes a handsome man more comely or an ugly one more terrifying. And it's free.
The marine next began teasing the Spartans about their notoriously short xiphos swords. He refused to believe that these were the actual weapons the Lakedaemonians carried into battle.
They must be toys. How could such diminutive apple-corers possibly work harm to an enemy?
The trick is-Dienekes demonstrated, pressing himself chest-to-chest to the Egyptian Tommie -to get nice and cozy.
When they parted, the Spartans presented the marines with two skins of Phalerian wine, the finest they had, a gift intended for the Rhodian consulate. The marines gave each Spartan a gold daric (a month's pay for a Greek oarsman) and a sack apiece of fresh Nile pomegranates.
The mission returned to Sparta unsuccessful. The Rhodi-ans, as His Majesty knows, are Dorian Hellenes; they speak a dialect similar to the Lakedaemonians and call their gods by the same Doric -derived names. But their island had been since before the first Persian War a protectorate of the Empire. What option other than submission did the Rhodians possess, their nation lying as it does within the very shadow of the masts of the imperial fleet? The Spartan embassy had sought, against all expectation, to detach through ancient bonds of kinship some portion of the Rhodian navy from service to His Majesty. It found no takers. Nor had there been, our embassy learned upon its return to the mainland, from simultaneous missions dispatched to Crete, Cos, Chios, Lesbos, Samos, Naxos, Imbros, Samo-thrace, Thasos, Skyros, Mykonos, Faros, Tenos and Lemnos. Even Delos, birthplace of Apollo himself, had offered tokens of submission to the Persian.
Phobos.
This terror could be inhaled in the air of Andros, where we touched upon the voyage home. One felt it like a sweat on the skin at Keos and Hermione, where no harbor inn or beaching ground lacked for ship's masters and oarsmen with terror- inspiring tales of the scale of mobilization in the East and eyewitness reports of the uncountable myriads of the enemy.
Phobos.
This stranger accompanied the embassy as it landed at Thyrea and began the dusty, two-day hump across Parnon to Lakedaemon. Trekking up the eastern massif, the envoys could see landsmen and city folk evacuating their possessions to the mountains. Boys drove asses laden with sacks of corn and barley, protected by the men of the family under arms. Soon the old ones and the children would follow. In the high country, clan groups were burying jars of wine and oil, building sheepfolds and carving crude shelters out of the cliffsides.
Phobos.
At the frontier fort of Karyai, our party fell in with an embassy from the Greek city of Plataea, a dozen men including a mounted escort, headed for Sparta. Their ambassador was the hero Arimnestos of Marathon. It was said that this gentleman, though well past fifty, had in that famous victory ten years past waded in full armor into the surf, slashing with his sword at the oars of the Persian triremes as they backed water, fleeing for their lives. The Spartans loved this sort of thing. They insisted on Arimnestos' party joining ours for supper and accompanying us on the remaining march to the city itself.
The Plataean shared his intelligence of the enemy. The Persian army, he reported, comprised of two million men drawn from every nation of the Empire, had assembled at the Great King's capital, Susa, in the previous summer. The force had advanced to Sardis and wintered there.
From this site, as the greenest lieutenant could not fail to project, the myriads would proceed north along the coast highways of Asia Minor, through Aeolis and the Troad, crossing the Hellespont by either bridge of boats or massive ferrying operation, then proceed west, traversing Thrace and the Chersonese, southwest across Macedonia and then south into Thessaly.
Greece proper.
The Spartans recounted what they had learned at Rhodes; that the Persian army was already on the march from Sardis; the main body stood even now at Abydos, readying to cross the Hellespont.
They would be in Europe within a month.
At Selassia a messenger from the ephors in Sparta awaited my master with an ambassadorial pouch. Dienekes was to detach himself from the party and proceed at once to Olympia. He took his leave at the Pellana road and, accompanied by myself alone, set out at a fast march, intending to cover the fifty miles in two days.
It is not uncommon upon these treks to have fall in with one as he tramps various high-spirited hounds and even half-wild urchins of the vicinity. Sometimes these carefree comrades remain on the troop all day, trotting in merry converse at the trekker's heels. Dienekes loved these ranging strays and never failed to welcome them and take cheer in their serendipitous companionship.
This day, however, he sternly dismissed all we encountered, canine as well as human, striding resolutely onward, glancing neither left nor right.
I had never seen him so troubled or so grave.
An incident had occurred at Rhodes which I felt certain lay at the source of my master's disquiet.
This event transpired at the harbor, immediately after the Spartans and Egyptian marines had completed their exchange of gifts and were making ready to take leave of one another. There arose then that interval when strangers often discard that formality of intercourse with which they have heretofore conversed and speak instead man-to-man, from the heart. The captain Ptammitechus had clearly taken to my master and the poiemarch Olympieus, Alexandras' father.
He summoned these now aside, declaring that he had something be wished to show them. He led them into the naval commander's campaign tent, erected there upon the strand, and with this officer's permission produced a marvel the like of which the Spartans, and of course I myself, had never beheld. This was a map.
A geographer's representation not merely of Hellas and the islands of the Aegean but of the entire world.
The chart spread in breadth nearly two meters, of consummate detail and craftsmanship and inscribed upon Nile papyrus, a medium so extraordinary that though held to the light one could see straight through it, yet even the strongest man's hands could not rend it, save by first opening a tear with the edge of a blade.
The marine rolled the map out upon the squadron commander's table. He showed the Spartans their own homeland, in the heart of the Peloponnese, with Athens 140 miles to the north and east, Thebes and Thessaly due north of there, and Mounts Ossa and Olympus at the northernmost extremity of Greece. West of this the mapmaker's stylus had depicted Sikelia, Italia and all the leagues of sea and land clear to the Pillars of Herakles. Yet the bulk of the chart had barely begun to be unfurled.
I wish only to impress upon you, for your own preserva-tion, gentlemen, Ptammitechus addressed the Spartans through his interpreter, the scale of His Majesty's Empire and the resources he commands to bring against you, that you may make your decision to resist or not, based upon fact and not fancy.
He unrolled the papyrus eastward. Beneath the lamplight arose the islands of the Aegean, Macedonia, Illyria, Thrace and Scythia, the Hellespont, Lydia, Karia, Cilicia, Phoenicia and the Ionic cities of Asia Minor. All these nations the Great King controls. AH these he has compelled into his service. All these are coming against you. But is this Persia? Have we reached yet the seat of Empire…
Out rolled more leagues of landmass. The Egyptian's hand swept over the outlines of Ethiopia, Libya, Arabia, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Sumeria, Cappadocia, Armenia and the transCaucasus. The fame of each of these kingdoms he recited, quoting the numbers of their warriors and the arms and armaments they carried.
A man traveling fast may traverse all the Peloponnese in four days. Look here, my friends.
Merely to get from Tyre to Susa, the Great King's capital, is three months' march. And all that land, all its men and wealth, belong to Xerxes. Nor do his nations contend one against the other as you Hellenes love so to do, nor disunite into squabbling alliances. When the King says assemble, his armies assemble. When he says march, they march. And still, he said, we have not reached PersepoHs and the heart of Persia. He rolled the map out farther.
Into sight arose yet more lands covering yet more leagues and called by yet more curious names.
The Egyptian reeled off more numbers. Two hundred thousand from this satrapy, 300,000 from that. Greece, in the West, was looking punier and punier. She seemed to be shriveling into a microcosm in contrast to the endless mass of the Persian Empire. The Egyptian spoke now of outlandish beasts and chimera. Camels and elephants, wild asses the size of draught horses. He sketched the lands of Persia herself, then Media, Bactria, Partrua, Cas-pia, Aria, Sogdiana and India, nations of whose names and existence his listeners had never even heard.
From these vast lands His Majesty draws more myriads of warriors, men raised under the blistering sun of the East, inured to hardships beyond your imagining, armed with weapons you have no experience in combating and financed by gold and treasure beyond counting. Every article of produce, every fruit, grain, pig, sheep, cow, horse, the yield of every mine, farm, forest and vineyard belongs to His Majesty. And all of it he has poured into the mounting of this army which marches now to enslave you.
Listen to me, brothers. The race of Egyptians is an ancient one, numbering the generations of its fathers by the hundreds into antiquity. We have seen empires come and go. We have ruled and been ruled. Even now we are technically a conquered people, we serve the Persians. Yet regard my station, friends. Do I look poor? Is my demeanor dishonored? Peer here within my purse.
With all respect, brothers, I could buy and sell you and all you own with only that which I bear upon my person.
At that point Olympieus called the Egyptian short and demanded that he speak to his point.
My point is this, friends: His Majesty will honor you Spartans no less than us Egyptians, or any other great warrior people, should you see wisdom and enlist yourselves voluntarily beneath his banner. In the East we have learned that which you Greeks have not. The wheel turns, and man must turn with it. To resist is not mere folly, but madness.
I watched my master's eyes then. Clearly he perceived the Egyptian's intent as genuine and his words proffered out of friendship and regard. Yet he could not stop anger from flushing his countenance.
You have never tasted freedom, friend, Dienekes spoke, or you would know it is purchased not with gold, but steel. He contained his anger swiftly, reaching to rap the Egyptian's shoulder like a friend and to meet his eyes with a smile.
And as for the wheel you speak of, my master finished, like every other, it turns both ways.
We arrived at Olympia on the afternoon of the second day from Pellana. The Olympic Games, sacred to Zeus, are the holiest of all Hellenic festivals; during the weeks of their celebration no Greek may take up arms against another, or even against an alien invader. The Games would be held this very year, within weeks; in fact the Olympic grounds and dormitories were already teeming with athletes and trainers from all the Greek cities, preparing on-site as prescribed by heaven's law. These competitors, in their youthful prime and peerless in speed and prowess, surrounded my master on the instant of his arrival, clamorous for intelligence of the Persian advance and torn by the Olympic proscription from bearing arms. It was not my place to inquire of my master's mission; one could only surmise, however, that it entailed a request for dispensation from the priests.
I waited outside the precinct while Dienekes conducted his business within. Several hours of daylight remained when he finished; our two-man party, unescorted as it was, should have turned about and pushed on for Sparta at once. But my master's troubled mood continued; he seemed to be working something out in his mind. Come on, he said, leading toward the Avenue of the Champions, west of the Olympic stadium, I'll show you something for your education.
We detoured to the steles of honor, where the names and nations of champions of the Games were recorded. There my own eye located the name of Polynikes, one of my master's fellow envoys to Rhodes, graven twice for successive Olympiads, victor in the armored stadion race.
Dienekes pointed out the names of other Lakedaemonian champions, men now in their thirties and forties whom I knew by sight from the city, and others who had fallen in battle decades and even centuries past. Then he indicated a final name, four Olympiads previous, in the victors' lists for the pentathlon.
Iatrokles Son of Nikodiades Lakedaemonian This was my brother, Dienekes said.
That night my master took shelter at the Spartan dormitory, a cot being vacated for him within and space set aside for me beneath the porticoes. But his mood of disquiet had not abated. Before I had even settled on the cool stones, he appeared from within fully dressed and motioned me to follow. We traversed the deserted avenues to the Olympic stadium, entering via the competitors' tunnel and emerging into the vast and silent expanse of the agonists' arena, purple and brooding now in the starlight. Dienekes mounted the slope above the judges' station, those seats upon the grass reserved during the Games for the Spartans. He selected a sheltered site beneath the pines at the crest of the slope overlooking the stadium, and there he settled. I have heard it said that for the lover the seasons are marked in memory by those mistresses whose beauty has en-flamed his heart. He recalls this year as the one when, moonstruck, he pursued a certain beloved about the city, and that year, when another favorite yielded at last to his charms.
For the mother and father, on the other hand, the seasons are numbered by the births of their children – this one's first step, that one's initial word. By these homely ticks is the calendar of the loving parent's life demarcated and set within the book of remembrance.
But for the warrior, the seasons are marked not by these sweet measures nor by the calendared years themselves, but by battles. Campaigns fought and comrades lost; trials of death survived.
Clashes and conflicts from which time effaces all superficial recall, leaving only the fields themselves and their names, which achieve in the warrior's memory a stature ennobled beyond all other modes of commemoration, purchased with the holy coin of blood and paid for with the lives of beloved brothers- in-arms. As the priest with his graphis and tablet of wax, the infantryman, too, has his scription. His history is carved upon his person with the stylus of steel, his alphabet engraved with spear and sword indelibly upon the flesh.
Dienekes settled upon the shadowed earth above the stadium. I began now, as was my duty as his squire, to prepare and apply the warm oil, laced with clove and comfrey, which were required by my master, and virtually every other Peer past thirty years, simply to settle himself upon the earth in sleep. Dienekes was far from an old man, barely two years past forty, yet his limbs and joints creaked like an ancient's. His former squire, a Scythian called Suicide, had instructed me in the proper manner of kneading the knots and loaves of scar tissue about my master's numerous wounds, and the little tricks in arming him so that his impairments would not show. His left shoulder could not move forward past his ear, nor could that arm rise at the elbow above his collarbone; the corselet had to be wrapped first about his torso, which he would support by pinning it with his elbows while I set the shoulder leathers and thumb-bolted them into place. His spine would not bend to lift his shield, even from its position of rest against his knee; the bronze sleeve had to be held aloft by me and jockeyed into place over the forearm, in the standing position. Nor could Dienekes flex his right foot unless the tendon was massaged until the flow of the nerves had been restored along their axis of command.
My master's most gruesome wound, however, was a lurid scar, the width of a man's thumb, that ran in jagged course across the entire crown of his brow, just below the hairline.
This was not visible normally, covered as it was by the fall of his long hair across his forehead, but when he bound his hair to accept the helmet, or tied it back for sleep, this livid gash represented itself. I could see it now in the starlight. Apparently the curiosity in my expression struck my master as comical, for he chuckled and lifted his hand to trace the line of the scar.
This was a gift from the Corinthians, Xeo. An ancient one, picked up around the time you were born. Its history, aptly enough, tells a tale of my brother.
My master glanced away, down the slope that led toward the Avenue of the Champions. Perhaps he felt the proximity of his brother's shade, or the fleeting shards of memory, from boyhood or battle or the agon of the Games. He indicated that I might pour for him a bowl of wine, and that I may take one for myself.
I wasn't an officer then, he volunteered, still preoccupied. I wore a banty hat instead of a curry brush. Meaning the front-to-back-crested helmet of the infantry ranker, instead of the transverse-crested helm of a platoon leader. Would you like to hear the tale, Xeo? As a bedtime story.
I replied that I would, very much. My master considered. Clearly he was debating in his mind if such a retelling constituted vanity or excessive self-revelation. If it did, he would break it off at once. Apparently, however, the incident contained an element of instruction, for, with a barely perceptible nod, my master gave himself permission to proceed. He settled more comfortably against the slope.
This was at Achilleion, against the Corinthians and their Arkadian allies. I don't even remember what the war was about, but whatever it was, those sons of whores had found their courage. They were putting the steel to us. The line had broken down, the first four ranks were scrambled, it was man against man across the entire field. My brother was a platoon leader and I was a third.
Meaning he, Dienekes, commanded the third squad, sixteen positions back in order of march. So that when we deployed into line by fours, I came up to my third's position beside my brother at the head of my squad. We fought as a dyas, Iatrokles and I; we had trained in the pairs since we were children. Only there was none of that sport now, it was pure blood madness.
I found myself across from a monster of the enemy, six and a half feet tall, a match for two men and a horse. He was dismasted, his spear had been shivered, and he was so raging with possession he didn't have the presence of mind to go for his sword. I said to myself, man, you better get some iron into this bastard fast, before he remembers he's got that daisy-chopper on his hip.
I went for him. He met me with his shield as a weapon, swinging it, edge-on like an axe. His first blow splintered my own shield. I had my eight-footer by the haft, trying to up-percut him, but he splintered the shaft clean through with a second blow. I was now bronze-naked in front of this demon. He swung that shield like a relish plate. Took me right here, square above the eye sockets.
I could feel the crown of the helmet tear up and off, shearing half my skull with it. The bottom lip of the eyehole had opened the muscles beneath the brow, so that my left eye was sheeted with blood.
I had that helpless feeling you get when you're wounded, when you know it's bad but you don't know how bad, you think you may be dead already but you're not sure. Everything is happening slowly, as in a dream. I was down on my face. I knew this giant was over me, aiming some blow to send me to hell.
Suddenly he was there beside me. My brother. I saw him take a step and sling his xiphos like a throwing blade. It hit this Corinthian Gorgon right below the nose; the iron smashed the fellow's teeth, blew right through the bone of the jaw and into his throat, lodging there with the grip sticking out before his face.
Dienekes shook his head and released a dark chuckle, the kind one summons recalling a tale at a distance, knowing how close he had come to annihilation and in awe before the gods that he had somehow survived. It didn't even slow this dick-stroker down. He came right back at Iatrokles, with bare hands and that pig-poker buried square in his jaw. I took him low and my brother took him high. We dropped him like a wrestler. I drove the blade end of my eight-footer that was now a one-footer into his guts, then grabbed the butt-spike end of someone's discarded eight from the dirt and laid all my weight on it, right through his groin all the way into the ground, nailing him there. My brother had grabbed the bastard's sword and hacked half the top of his head off, right through the bronze of his helmet. He still got up. I had never seen my brother truly terrified but this time it was serious. 'Zeus Almighty!' he cried, and it was not a curse but a prayer, a pissdown-your-leg prayer.
The night had grown cool; my master draped his cloak around his shoulders. He took another draught of wine.
He had a squire, my brother did, from Antaurus in Scythia, of whom you may have heard. This man was called by the Spartans 'Suicide.'
My expression must have betrayed startlement, for Dienekes chuckled in response. This fellow, the Scythian, had been Dienekes' squire before me; he became my own mentor and instructor. It was all new to me, however, that the man had served my master's brother before him.
This reprobate had come to Sparta like you, Xeo, on his own, the crazy bastard. Fleeing bloodguilt, a murder; he had killed his father or father-in-law, I forget which, in some hill-tribe dispute over a girl. When he arrived in Lakedaemon, he asked the first man he met to dispatch him, and scores more for days. No one would do it, they feared ritual pollution; finally my brother took him with him to battle, promising he'd get him polished off there.
The man turned out a holy terror. He wouldn't keep to the rear like the other squires, but waded right in, unarmored, seeking death, crying out for it. His weapon, as you know, was the javelin; he crafted his own, sawed-off specimens no longer than a man's arm, which he called 'darning needles.' He carried twelve of them, in a quiver like arrows, and threw them by the clutch of three, one after the other, at the same man, saving the third for the close work.
This indeed described the man. Even now, what must be twenty years later, he remained fearless to the point of madness and utterly reckless of his life.
Anyway here he came now, this Scythian lunatic. Hoom, hoom, hoom, he put two darning needles through that Corinthian monster's liver and out his back, and added one for good measure right where the man's fruit hung. That did it. The titan looked straight at me, bellowed once, then dropped like a sack off a waggon. I realized later that half my skull was showing through to the sun, my face a mass of blood, and the whole right side of my beard and chin had been hacked off.
How did you get out of the battle? I asked.
Get out.7 We had to fight across another thousand yards before the enemy finally turned the creases and it was over. I couldn't tell the state I was in. My brother wouldn't let me touch my face. 'You've got a few scratches,' he said. I could feel the breeze on my skull; I knew it was bad.
I remember only this ghoulish surgeon, our friend Suicide, stitching me up with sailor's twine while my brother held my head and cracked jokes. 'You're not going to be too pretty after this one. I won't have to worry any more about you stealing my bride.'
Here Dienekes drew up, his expression going suddenly sober and solemn. He declared that the story at this point proceeded into the province of the personal. He must put a period to it.
I begged him to continue. He could see the disappointment on my face. Please, sir. You must not carry the tale this far, only to discard it by the wayside.
You know, he offered in wry admonishment, what happens to squires who spread tales out of school. He took a draught of wine and, after a thoughtful moment, resumed.
You are aware that I am not my wife's first husband. Arete was married to my brother first.
I had known this, but never from my master's lips.
It created a grievous rift in my family, because I habitually declined to share a meal at his home, I always found some excuse. My brother was deeply wounded by this, thinking I disrespected his wife or had found some fault in her which I would not divulge. He had taken her from her family very young, when she was just seventeen, and this overhaste I know troubled him. He wanted her so much he couldn't wait, he was afraid another would claim her. So when I avoided his house, he thought I found fault with him for this He went to our father and even to the ephors over it, seeking to force me to accept his invitations. One day we wrestled in the palaistra and he nearly strangled me (I was never half a match for him) and ordered me that evening to present myself at his home, in my best dress and manners. He swore he would break my back if I gave offense once more.
It was just getting to be evening when I spotted him approaching me again, beside the Big Ring, as I was finishing training. You know the lady Arete and her tongue. She had had a talk with him.
'You are blind, Iatrokles,' she had said. 'Can't you see that your brother has feelings for me? That is why he declines all invitations to visit with us. He feels shame to experience these passions for his brother's wife.'
My brother asked me straight out if this was true. I lied like a dog, but he saw through me as he always did. You could see he was profoundly troubled. He stood absolutely still, in a way he had since he was a boy, considering the matter. 'She will be yours when I am slain in battle,' he declared. That seemed to settle the matter for him.
But not for me. Within a week I found excuse to get myself out of the city, assisting on an embassy overseas. I managed to keep away for the whole winter, returning only when the Herakles regiment was called up for Pellene. My brother was killed there. I didn't even know it in the advance, not until the battle was won and we remustered. I was twenty-four years old. He was thirty-one.
Dienekes' countenance grew even more solemn. All effect of the wine had fled. He hesitated for long moments, as if considering whether to continue or break off the tale at this point. He scrutinized my expression until at last, seeming to satisfy himself that I was listening with the proper attention and respect, he dumped the dregs of his bowl and continued.
I felt it was my doing, my brother's death, as if I had willed it in secret and the gods had somehow responded to this shameful prayer. It was the most painful thing that had ever happened to me. I felt I couldn't go on living, but I didn't know how honorably to end my life. I had to come home, for my father and mother's sake and for the funeral games. I never went near Arete. I intended to leave Lakedaemon again as soon as the games were over, but her father came to me.
'Aren't you going to say one word to my daughter?' He had no clue of my feelings for her, he simply meant the courtesy of a brother-in-law and my obligation as kyrios to see that Arete was given to a proper husband. He said that husband should be myself. I was Iatrokles' only brother, the families were already profoundly intertwined and since Arete had as yet borne no children, mine with hers would be as if they were my brother's as well.
I declined.
This gentleman could make no guess of the real reason, that I couldn't embrace the shame of satisfying my deepest self-interest over the bones of my own brother. Arete's father could not understand; he was deeply hurt and insulted. It was an impossible situation, spawning suffering and sorrow in every quarter. I had no idea how to set it right. I was at wrestling one afternoon, just going through the motions, plagued by internal torment, when there came a commotion at the Gymnasion gate. A woman had entered the precinct. No female, as all know, may intrude upon those grounds. Murmurs of outrage were building. I myself arose from the pit-gymnos as all were, naked-to join the others in throwing the interloper out.
Then I saw. It was Arete.
The men parted before her like grain before the reapers. She stopped right beside the lanes, where the boxers were standing naked waiting to enter the ring.
'Which of you will have me as his wife?' she demanded of the entire assembly, who were by now gaping slack-jawed, dumbstruck as calves. Arete is a lovely woman still, even after four daughters, but then, yet childless and barely nineteen, she was as dazzling as a goddess. Not a man didn't desire her, but they were all too paralyzed to utter a peep. 'Will no man come forward to claim me?'
She turned and marched then, right up in front of me. 'Then you must make me your wife, Dienekes, or my father will not be able to bear the shame.'
My heart was wrenched by this, half-numb at the sheer brass and temerity of this woman, this girl, to attempt such a stunt, the other half moved profoundly by her courage and wit.
What happened? I asked.
What choice did I have? I became her husband. Dienekes related several other tales of his brother's prowess in the Games and his valor in battle. In every field, in speed and wit and beauty, in virtue and forbearance, even in the chorus, his brother eclipsed him. It was clear Dienekes revered him, not merely as a younger brother will his elder, but as a man, in sober assessment and admiration. What a pair latrokles and Arete made. The whole city anticipated their sons. What warriors and heroes their combined lines would produce.
But Iatrokles and Arete had had no children, and the lady's with Dienekes had all been girls.
Dienekes gave it no voice, but one could readily perceive the sorrow and regret upon his face.
Why had the gods granted him and Arete only daughters? What could it be but their curse, that divinely apportioned requital for the crime of selfish love in my master's heart? Dienekes rose from this preoccupation, or what I felt certain was this preoccupation, and gestured down the slope toward the Avenue of the Champions.
Thus you see, Xeo, how courage before the enemy may perhaps come more easily to me than to others. I hold the example of my brother before me. I know that no matter what feat of valor the gods permit me to perform, I will never be his equal. This is my secret. What keeps me humble.
He smiled. An odd, sad sort of smile.
So now, Xeo, you know the secrets of my heart. And how I came to be the handsome fellow you see before you. I laughed, as my master had wanted. All merriment, however, had fled his features.
And now I am tired, he said, shifting upon the earth. If you will excuse me, it's time to deflower the straw maiden, as they say.
And with that he curled upon his reed groundbed and settled at once into sleep.