The preceding interviews were transcribed over the course of I several evenings as His Majesty's forces continued their still-unopposed advance into Hellas. The defenders at Thermopylae having been vanquished, the Hellenic fleet suffering further severe losses of ships and men at the naval battle fought simultaneously opposite Artemisium, all Greek and allied units, army and navy, now fled the field. The Hellenic land forces retreated south toward the Isthmus of Corinth, across which they and the armies now massing from the other Greek cities, including the forces of Sparta under a full call-up, were constructing a wall to defend the Pelo-ponnese. The sea elements withdrew around Euboea and Cape Sounion to unite with the main body of the Hellenic fleet at Athens and Salamis in the Gulf of Saronika.
His Majesty's army put all Phokis to the torch. Imperial troops burned to the ground the cities of Drymus, Charada, Er-ochus, Tethronium, Amphikaea, Neon, Pedies, Trites, Elateia, Hylampolis and Parapotamii. All temples and sanctuaries of the Hellenic goo's, including that of Apollo at Abae, were razed and their treasuries looted.
As for His Majesty Himself, the Royal Person's time now became consumed, nearly twenty hours a day, with urgent matters military and diplomatic. These demands notwithstanding, yet did His Majesty's desire remain undiminished to hear the continuation of the captive Xeones' tale. He ordered the interviews to proceed in His absence, their verbatim record to be transcribed for His Majesty's perusal at such hours as He found free.
The Greek responded vigorously to this order. The sight of his native Hellas being reduced by the overmastering numbers of the imperial forces caused the man severe distress and seemed to fire his will to commit to record as much of his tale as he could, as expeditiously as possible.
Dispatches relating the overrunning of the Temple of the Oracle of Apollo at Delphi seemed only to increase the prisoner's grief. Privately he stated his concern thai His Majesty was growing impatient with the tale of his own and other individuals' personal histories and becoming anxious to move on to the more apposite topics of Spartan tactics, training and military philosophy. The Greek begged His Majesty's patience, stating that the tale seemed to be telling itself at the god's direction and that he, its narrator, could only follow where it led.
We began again, His Majesty absent, on the evening of the ninth day of Tashritu, in the tent of Orontes, captain of the Immortals. is Majesty has requested that I tecount some of the training practices of the Spartans, particularly those relating to the youth and their rearing under the Lykurgan warrior code. A specific incident may be illustrative, not only to impart certain details but to convey also the flavor of the thing.
This event was in nowise atypical. I report it both for its informative value and because it involved several of the men whose heroism His Majesty witnessed with his own eyes during the struggle at the Hot Gates.
This incident took place some six years prior to the battle at Thermopylae. I was fourteen at the time and not yet employed by my master as his battle squire; in fact I had at that time barely dwelt in Lakedaemon two years. I was serving as a parastates pais, a sparring partner, to a Spartiate youth of my own age named Alexandras. This individual I have mentioned once or twice in other contexts. He was the son of the polemarch, or war leader, Olympieus, and at that time, aged fourteen, the protege of Dienekes.
Alexandros was a scion of one of the noblest families of Sparta; his line descended on the Eurypontid side directly from Herakles. He was, however, not constitutionally suited to the role of warrior. In a gentler world Alexandros might have been a poet or musician. He was easily the most accomplished flute player of his age-class, though he barely touched the instrument to practice. His gifts as a singer were even more exceptional, both as a boy alto and later as a man when his voice stabilized into a pure tenor.
It chanced, unless the hand of a god was at work in it, that he and I when we were thirteen were flogged simultaneously, for separate offenses, on different sides of the same training field. His transgression related to some breach within his agoge boua, his training platoon; mine was for improperly shaving the throat of a sacrificial goat.
In our separate whippings, Alexandros fell before I did. I mention this not as cause for pride; it was simply that I had taken more beatings. I was more accustomed to it. The contrast in our deportment, unfortunately for Alexandros, was perceived as a disgrace of the most egregious order. As a means of rubbing his nose in it, his drill instructors assigned me permanently to him, with instructions that he fight me over and over until he could beat the hell out of me. For my part, I was informed that if I was even suspected of going easy on him, out of fear of the consequences of harming my better, I would be lashed until the bones of my back showed through to the sun.
The Lakedaemonians are extremely shrewd in these matters; they know that no arrangement could be more cunningly contrived to bind two youths together. I was keenly aware that, if I played my part satisfactorily, I would continue in Alexandros' service and become his squire when he reached twenty and took his station as a warrior in line of battle. Nothing could have suited me more. This was why I had come to Sparta in the first place-to witness the training close-up and to endure as much of it as the Lakedaemonians would permit.
The army was at the Oaks, in the Otona valley, a blistering late summer afternoon, on an eightnighter, what they call in Lakedaemon, the only city which practices it, an oktonyktia. These are regimental exercises normally, though in this case it involved a division. An entire mom, more than twelve hundred men with full armor and battle train including an equal number of squires and helots, had marched out into the high valleys and drilled in darkness for four nights, sleeping in the day in open bivouac, by watches, at full readiness with no cover, then drilling day and night for the following three days. Conditions were deliberately contrived to make the exercise as close as possible to the rigor of actual campaign, simulating everything except casualties. There were mock night assaults up twenty-degree slopes, each man bearing full kit and panoplia, sixtyfive to eighty pounds of shield and armor. Then assaults down the hill. Then more across. The terrain was chosen for its boulder-strewn aspect and the numerous gnarled and low-branched oaks which dotted the slopes. The skill was to flow around everything, like water over rocks, without breaking the line.
No amenities whatever were brought. Wine was at half-rations the first four days, none the second two, then no liquid at all, including water, for the final two. Rations were hard linseed loaves, which Dienekes declared fit only for barn insulation, and figs alone, nothing hot. This type of exercise is only partially in anticipation of night action; its primary purpose is training for surefootedness, for orientation by feel within the phalanx and for action without sight, particularly over uneven ground. It is axiomatic among the Lakedaemonians that an army must be able to dress and maneuver the line as skillfully blind as sighted, for, as His Majesty knows, in the dust and terror of the othismos, the initial battlefield collision and the horrific scrum that ensues, no man can see more than five feet in any direction, nor hear even his own cries above the din.
It is a common misconception among the other Hellenes, and one deliberately cultivated by the Spartans, that the character of Lakedaemonian military training is brutal and humorless in the extreme. Nothing could be further from the fact. I have never experienced under other circumstances anything like the relentless hilarity that proceeds during these otherwise grueling field exercises. The men bitch and crack jokes from the moment the salpinx' blare sounds reveille till the final bone-fatigued hour when the warriors curl up in their cloaks for sleep, and even then you can hear cracks being muttered and punchy laughter breaking out in odd corners of the field for minutes until sleep, which comes on like a hammerblow, overtakes them.
It is that peculiar soldiers' humor which springs from the experience of shared misery and often translates poorly to those not on the spot and enduring the same hardship. What's the difference between a Spartan king and a mid-ranker? One man will lob this query to his mate as they prepare to bed down in the open in a cold driving ram. His friend considers mock-theatrically for a moment. The king sleeps in that shithole over there, he replies. We sleep m this shithole over here.
The more miserable the conditions, the more convulsing the jokes become, or at least that's how it seems. I have witnessed venerable Peers of fifty years and more, with thick gray in their beards and countenances as distinguished as Zeus', dropping helpless with mirth onto hands and knees, toppling onto their backs and practically pissing down their legs they were laughing so hard.
Once on an errand I saw Leonidas himself, unable to get to his feet for a minute or more, so doubled over was he from some otherwise untranslatable wisecrack. Each time he tried to rise, one of his tent companions, grizzled captains in their late fifties but to him just boyhood chums he still addressed by their agoge nicknames, would torment him with another variation on the joke, which would reconvulse him and drop him back upon his knees.
This, and other like incidents, endeared Leonidas univer-sally to the men, not just the Spartiate Peers but the Gentleman-Rankers and perioikoi as well. They could see their king, at nearly sixty, enduring every bit of misery they did. And they knew that when battle came, he would take his place not safely in the rear, but in the front rank, at the hottest and most perilous spot on the field.
The purpose of an eight-nighter is to drive the individuals of the division, and the unit itself, beyond the point of humor. It is when the jokes stop, they say, that the real lessons are learned and each man, and the mora as a whole, make those incremental advances which pay off in the ultimate crucible. The hardship of the exercises is intended less to strengthen the back than to toughen the mind. The Spartans say that any army may win while it still has its legs under it; the real test comes when all strength is fled and the men must produce victory on will alone.
The seventh day had come and gone now, and the army had reached that stage of exhaustion and short-temperedness that the eight-nighter was contrived to produce. It was late afternoon; the men were just rousing themselves from some pitifully inadequate catnap, parched and filthy and stink-begrimed, in anticipation of the final night's drill. Everyone was hungry and tired and drained utterly of fluid. A hundred variations were spun out on the same joke, each man's wish for a real war so he could finally get more than a half hour's snooze and a bellyful of hot chow.
The men were dressing their long sweat-matted hair, griping and bitching, while their squires and helots, as miserable and dehydrated as they, handed them the last dry fig cake, without wine or water, and readied them for the sunset sacrifice, while their stacked arms and panoplia waited in perfect order for the night's work to begin.
Alexandras' training platoon was already awake and in formation, with eight others of the fourth age-class, boys thirteen and fourteen under their twenty-year-old drill instructors, on the lower slopes below the army's camp. These agoge platoons were regularly exposed to the sight of their elders and the rigors they endured, as a means of rousing their emulative instincts to even greater levels of exertion. I had been dispatched to the upper camp with a message stick when the commotion came from back down across the plain.
I turned and saw Alexandros singled out at the edge of his platoon, with Polynikes, the Knight and Olympic champion, standing before him, raging. Alexandros was fourteen, Polynikes twenty-three; even at a range of a hundred yards you could see the boy was terrified.
This warrior Polynikes was no man to be trifled with. He was a nephew of Leonidas, with a prize of valor already to his name, and utterly pitiless. Apparently he had come down from the upper camp on some errand, had passed the boys of the agoge in their lineup and spotted some breach of discipline.
Now the Peers on the slope above could see what it was, Alexandros had neglected his shield, or to use the Doric term, etimasen, defamed it. Somehow he had allowed it to lie outside his grasp, facedown, untended on the ground with its big concave bowl pointing at the sky.
Polynikes stood in front of him. What is this I see in the dirt before me? he roared. The Spartiates uphill could hear every syllable.
It must be a chamber pot, with its bowl peeking up so daintily.
Is it a chamber pot? he demanded of Alexandros. The boy answered no.
Then what is it?
It is a shield, lord.
Polynikes declared this impossible.
It can't be a shield, I'm certain of that. His voice carried powerfully up the amphitheater of the valley. Because not even the dumbest bum-fucked shitworm of a paidarion would leave a shield lying facedown where he couldn't snatch it up in an instant when the enemy came upon him. He towered above the mortified boy.
It is a chamber pot, Polynikes declared. Fill it.
The torture began.
Alexandras was ordered to piss into his shield. It was a training shield, yes. But Dienekes knew as he looked down with the other Peers from the slope above that this particular aspis, patched and repatched over decades, had belonged to Alexandras' father and grandfather before him.
Alexandras was so scared and so dehydrated, he couldn't raise a drop.
Now a second factor entered the equation. This was the tendency among the youths in training, those who were not for the moment the object of their superiors' rage, to convulse with perverse glee at the misery of whatever luckless mate now found himself spitted above the coals. Up and down the line of boys, teeth sank into tongues seeking to suppress this fear-inspired hilarity. One lad named Ariston, who was extremely handsome and the fastest sprinter of the fourth class, something of a younger version of Polynikes himself, could not contain himself. A snort escaped his clamped jaws.
Polynikes turned upon him in fury. Ariston had three sisters, all what the Lakedaemonians call two-lookers, meaning they were so pretty that one look was not enough, you had to look twice to appreciate them.
Polynikes asked Ariston if he thought this was funny.
No, lord, the boy replied.
If you think this is funny, wait till you get into combat. You'll think that's hysterical.
No, lord.
Oh yes you will. You'll be giggling like your goddam sisters. He advanced a pace nearer. Is that what you think war is, you fucking come-spot?
No, lord.
Polynikes pressed his face inches from the boy's, glowering into his eyes with a look of blistering malice. Tell me. Which do you think will be the bigger laugh: when you take an enemy spear eighteen inches up the dogblossom, or when your psalm-singing mate Alexandras takes one?
Neither, lord. Ariston's face was stone.
You're afraid of me, aren't you? That's the real reason you're laughing. You're so fucking happy it wasn't you I singled out.
No, lord.
What? You're not afraid of me?
Polynikes demanded to know which it was. Because if Ariston was afraid of him, then he was a coward. And if he wasn't, he was reckless and ignorant, which was even worse.
Which is it, you miserable mound of shit? 'Cause you'd better fucking well be afraid of me. I'll put my dick in your right ear, pull it out your left and fill that chamber pot myself.
Polynikes ordered the other boys to take up Alexandras' slack. While their pathetic dribbles of urine splotched onto the wood and leather-padded frame, over the good-luck talismans that Alexandras' mother and sisters had made and that hung from the inner frame, Polynikes returned his attention to Alexandras, querying him on the protocol of the shield, which the boy knew and had known since he was three.
The shield must stand upright at all times, Alexandras declaimed at the top of his voice, with its forearm sleeve and handgrip at the ready. If a warrior stand at the rest, his shield must lean against his knees. If he sit or lie, it must be supported upright by the tripous basis, a light threelegged stand which all bore inside the bowl of the concave hoplon, in a carrying nest made for that purpose.
The other youths under Polynikes' orders had now finished urinating as best they could into the hollow of Alexandras' shield. I glanced at Dienekes. His features betrayed no emotion, though I knew he loved Alexandras and wished for nothing more than to dash down the slope and murder Polynikes.
But Polynikes was right. Alexandros was wrong. The boy must be taught a lesson.
Polynikes now had Alexandros' tripous basis in his hand. The little tripod was comprised of three dowels joined at one end by a leather thong. The dowels were the thickness of a man's finger and about eighteen inches long. Line of battle! Polynikes bellowed. The platoon of boys formed up.
He had them all lay their shields, defamed, facedown in the dirt, exactly as Alexandros had done.
By now twelve hundred Spartiates up the hill were observing the spectacle, along with an equal number of squires and helot attendants.
Shields, port!
The boys lunged for their heavy, grounded hopla. As they did, Polynikes lashed at Alexandras' face with the tripod. Blood sprung. He swatted the next boy and the next until the fifth at last wrestled his twenty-pound, unwieldy shield off the ground and up into place to defend himself.
He made them do it again and again and again.
Starting at one end of the line, then the other, then the middle. Polynikes, as I have said, was an Agiad, one of the Three Hundred Knights and an Olympic victor besides. He could do anything he liked. The drill instructor, who was just an eirene, had been brushed aside, and could do nothing but look on in mortification.
This is hilarious, isn't it? Polynikes demanded of the boys. I'm beside myself, aren't you? I can hardly wait to see combat, which will be even more fun.
The youths knew what was coming next.
Tree fucking.
When Polynikes tired of torturing them here, he would have their drill instructor march them over to the edge of the plain, to some particularly stout oak, and order them, in formation, to push the tree down with their shields, just the way they would assault an enemy in battle.
The boys would take station in ranks, eight deep, the shield of each pressed into the hollow of the boy's back before him, with the leading boy's shield mashed by their combined weight and pressure against the oak. Then they would do othismos drill.
They would push.
They would strain.
They would fuck that tree for all they were worth., The soles of their bare feet would churn the dirt, heaving and straining until a rut had been excavated ankle-deep, while they crushed each other's guts humping and hurling, grinding into that unmoveable trunk. When the front-rank boy could stand no more, he would assume the position of the rearmost and the second boy would move up.
Two hours later Polynikes would casually return, perhaps with several other young warriors, who had themselves been through this hell more than once during their own agoge years. These would observe with shock and disbelief that the tree was still standing. By God, these dog-strokers have been at it half the watch and that pitiful little sapling is still right where it was! Now effeminacy would be added to the list of the lads' crimes. It was unthinkable that they be allowed to return to the city while this tree yet defied them; such failure would disgrace their fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins, all the gods and heroes of their line, not to mention their hounds, cats, sheep and goats and even the rats in their helots' barns, who would hang their heads and have to slink off to Athens or some other rump-split polis where men were men and knew how to put out a respectable fucking.
That tree is the enemy!
Fuck the enemy!
On it would go, into all-night shield drill which by mid second watch would have reduced the boys to involuntary regurgitation and defecation; they would be puking and shitting themselves, their bodies shattered utterly from exhaustion, and then, when the dawn sacrifices at last brought clemency and reprieve, the boys would fall in for another full day of training without a minute's sleep.
This torment, the boys knew now as they stood under Polynikes' face-lashing, was yet to come.
This was what they had to look forward to.
By this point every nose in the formation had been broken. Each boy's face was a sheet of blood.
Polynikes was just taking a breath (he had tired his arm with all that swatting) when Alexandras thoughtlessly reached with a hand to the side of his blood-begrimed face.
What do you think you're doing, buttfuck? Polynikes turned instantly upon him.
Wiping the blood, lord.
What are you doing that for?
So I can see, lord.
Who the fuck told you you had a right to see?
Polynikes continued his blistering mockery. Why did Alexandras think the division was out here, training at night? Was it not to learn to fight when they couldn't see? Did Alexandras think that in combat he would be allowed to pause to wipe his face? That must be it. Alexandras would call out to the enemy and they would halt politely for a moment, so the boy could pluck a nosenugget from his nostril or wipe a turdberry from his crease. I ask you again, is this a chamber pot?
No, lord. It is my shield.
Again Polynikes' dowels blasted the boy across the face. 'My'? he demanded furiously.
'My'?
Dienekes looked on, mortified, from where he stood at the edge of the upper camp. Alexandras was excruciatingly aware that his mentor was watching; he seemed to summon his composure, rally all his senses. The boy stepped forward, shield at high port. He straightened to attention before Polynikes and enunciated in his loudest, clearest voice:
This is my shield. I bear it before me into battle, but it is not mine alone. It protects my brother on my left. It protects my city. I will never let my brother out of its shadow nor my city out of its shelter. I will die with my shield before me facing the enemy.
The boy finished. The last of his words, shouted at the top of his voice, echoed for a long moment around the valley walls.
Twenty-five hundred men stood listening and watching.
They could see Polynikes nod, satisfied. He barked an order. The boys resumed formation, each now with his shield in proper place, upright against its owner's knees.
Shields, port!
The boys lunged for their hopla.
Polynikes swung the tripod.
With a crack that could be heard across the valley, the slashing sticks struck the bronze of Alexandras' shield.
Polynikes swung again, at the next boy and next. All shields were in place. The line protected.
He did it again from the right and from the left. Now all shields leapt into the boys' grips, all swiftly into place before them.
There.
With a nod to the platoon's eirene, Polynikes stepped back. The boys held fast at attention, shields at high port, with the blood beginning to cake dry on their empurpled cheekbones and shattered noses.
Polynikes repeated his order to the drill instructor, that these sheep-stroking sons of whores would do tree-fucking till the end of the second watch, then shield drill till dawn.
He walked once down the line, meeting each boy's eye. Before Alexandras, he halted.
Your nose was too pretty, son of Olympieus. It was a girl's nose. He tossed the boy's tripod into the dirt at his feet. I like it better now.
One of the boys died that night. His name was Hermion; they called him Mountain. At fourteen he was as strong as any in his age-class or the class above, but dehydration in combination with exhaustion overcame him. He collapsed near the end of the second watch and fell into that state of convulsive torpor the Spartans call nekrophaneia, the Little Death, from which a man may recover if left alone but will die if he tries to rise or exert himself. Mountain understood his extremity but refused to stay down while his mates kept their feet and continued their drill.
I tried to make the platoon take water, I and my helot mate Dekton, whom they later called Rooster. We snuck a skin to them around the middle of the first watch, but the boys refused to accept it. At dawn they carried Mountain in on their shoulders, the way the fallen in battle are borne.
Alexandras' nose never did heal properly. His father had it broken again, twice, and reset by the finest battle surgeons, but the seam where the cartilage meets the bone never mended quite right.
The airway would constrict involuntarily, triggering those spasms of the lungs called by the Greeks asthma, which were excruciating simply to watch and must have been unbearable to endure. Alexandras blamed himself for the death of the boy called Mountain. These fits, he was certain, were the retribution of heaven for his lapse of concentration and unwarrior-like conduct.
The spasms enfeebled Alexandras' endurance and made him less and less a match for his agemates within the agoge. Worse still was the unpredictability of the attacks. When they hit, he was good for nothing for minutes at a stretch. If he could not find a way to reverse this condition, he could not when he reached manhood be made a warrior; he would lose his citizenship and be left to choose between living on in some lesser state of disgrace or embracing honor and taking his own life.
His father, gravely concerned, offered sacrifice again and again and even sent to Delphi for counsel from the Pythia. Nothing helped.
Aggravating the situation further was the fact that, despite what Polynikes had said about the boy's broken nose, Alexandras remained pretty. Nor did his breathing difficulties, for some reason, affect his singing. It seemed somehow that fear, rather than physical incapacity, was the trigger for these attacks.
The Spartans have a discipline they call phobologia, the science of fear. As his mentor, Dienekes worked with Alexandras privately on this, after evening mess and before dawn, while the units were forming up for sacrifice.
Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck.
A secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercises, is the face, specifically the muscles of the jaw, the neck and the four ocular constrictors around the eye sockets. These nexuses are termed by the Spartans phobosynakteres, fear accumulators.
Fear spawns in the body, phobologic science teaches, and must be combated there. For once the flesh is seized, a phobokyklos, or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itself, mounting into a runaway of terror. Put the body into a state of aphobia, fearlessness, the Spartans believe, and the mind will follow.
Under the oaks, in the still half-light before dawn, Dienekes practiced alone with Alexandras. He would tap the boy with an olive bough, very lightly, on the side of the face. Involuntarily the muscles of the trapezius would contract. Feel the fear? There. Feel it? The older man's voice crooned soothingly, like a trainer gentling a colt. Now. Drop your shoulder. He popped the boy's cheek again. Let the fear bleed out. Feel it?
Man and boy worked for hours on the owl muscles, the ophthalmomyes surrounding the eyes.
These, Dienekes instructed Alexandras, were in many ways the most powerful of all, for God in His wisdom made mortals' keenest defensive reflex that which protects the vision. Watch my face when the muscles constrict, Dienekes demonstrated. What expression is this? Phobos.
Fear.
Dienekes, schooled in the discipline, commanded his facial muscles to relent.
Now. What does this expression indicate? Aphobia. Fearlessness.
It seemed effortless when Dienekes did it, and the other boys in their training were practicing and mastering this too. But for Alexandras, nothing of the discipline came easy. The only time his heart beat truly without fear was when he mounted the choral stand and stood, solitary, to sing at the Gymnopaedia and the other boys' festivals.
Perhaps his true guardians were the Muses. Dienekes had Alexandras sacrifice to them and to Zeus and Mnemosyne. Agathe, one of the two-looker sisters of Ariston, made a charm of amber to Polyhymnia, and Alexandras carried it with him, pended from the Crosshatch within his shield.
Dienekes encouraged Alexandros in his singing. The gods endow each man with a gift by which he may conquer fear; Alexandros', Dienekes felt certain, was his voice. Skill in singing in Sparta is counted second only to martial valor and in fact is closely related, through the heart and lungs, within the discipline of the phobologia. This is why the Lakedaemonians sing as they advance into battle. They are schooled to open the throat and gulp the air, work the lungs till the accumulators relent and break the constriction of fear.
There are two running courses within the city: the Little Ring, which begins at the Gymnasion and follows the Ko-nooura road beneath Athena of the Brazen House, and the Big Ring, which laps all five villages, past Amyklai, along the Hyakinthian Way and across the slopes of Taygetos. Alexandros ran the big one, six miles barefoot, before sacrifice and after dinner mess.
Extra rations were slipped him by the helot cooks. By unspoken compact the boys of his boua protected him in training. They covered for him when his lungs betrayed him, when it seemed he might be singled out for punishment. Alexandros responded with a secret shame which propelled him to even greater exertions.
He began to train in the all-in, that type of no-holds-barred boys' brawling unique to Lakedaemon, in which the competitor may kick, bite, gouge the eyes, do anything but raise the hand for quarter. Alexandros hurled himself barefoot up the Therai watercourse and bare-handed against the pankratist's bag; he ran weighted sprints, he pounded his fists into the trainer's boxes of sand. His slender hands became scarred and knuckle-busted. His nose broke again and again.
He fought boys from his own platoon and others, and he fought me.
I was growing fast. My hands were getting stronger. Every athletic action Alexandros performed, I could do better. In the fighting square it was all I could do not to break up his face even more.
He should have hated me, but it was not in him. He shared his surplus rations and worried that I would be whipped for going easy on him.
We talked for hours in secret on the pursuit of esoterike harmonia, that state of self-composure which the exercises of the phobologia are designed to produce- As a string of the kithera vibrates purely, emitting only that note of the musical scale which is its alone, so must the individual warrior shed all which is superfluous in his spirit, until he himself vibrates at that sole pitch which his individual daimon dictates. The achievement of this ideal, in Lakedaemon, carries beyond courage on the battlefield; it is considered the supreme embodiment of virtue, andreia, of a citizen and a man.
Beyond esoterike harmonia lies exoterike harmonia, that state of union with one's fellows which parallels the musical harmony of the multistringed instrument or of the chorus of voices itself. In battle exoterike harmonia guides the phalanx to move and strike as one man, of a single mind and will. In passion it unites husband to wife, lover to lover, in wordless perfect union. In politics exoterike harmonia produces a city of concord and unity, in which each individual, securing his own noblest expression of character, donates this to each other, as obedient to the laws of the commonwealth as the strings of the kithera to the immutable mathematics of music. In piety exoterike harmonia produces that silent symphony which most delights the ears of the gods.
At the height of that summer there was a war with the Antirhionians. Four of the army's twelve lochoi were mobilized (reinforced by elements of the Skiritai, the mountain rangers who comprised their own main-force regiment) to a call-up of the first ten age-classes, twenty-eight hundred in all. This was no force to be taken lightly, all-Lakedaemonian, commanded by the king himself; the battle train alone would be half a mile long. It would be the first full-scale campaign since the death of Kleomenes and the third in which Leoni-das would assume command as king, Polynikes would go as a Knight of the king's bodyguard, Olympieus with the Huntress battalion in the Wild Olive lochos and Dienekes as a platoon commander, an enomotarch, in the Herakles.
Even Dekton, my half-breed friend, would be mobilized as herd boy for the sacrificial beasts.
The entire Deukalion mess in which Alexandros stood-to, meaning acted as occasional cupbearer and server so he could observe his elders and learn, was called up except the five eldest men, between forty and sixty. For Alexandros, though he was six years too young to go, the mobilization seemed to plunge him even more deeply under his cloud. The uncalled-up Peers twitched about with their own brand of frustration. The air was touchy and ripe for explosiveness.
Somehow an all-in match got started one evening between Alexandros and me, outdoors behind the mess. The Peers gathered eagerly; the action was just what they needed. I could hear Dienekes' voice, cheering the brawl on. Alexandros seemed full of fire; we were bare-handed and his smallish fists flew fast as darts. He kicked me hard, to the temple, and followed with a solid elbow to the gut; I dropped. It was a true fall, I was really hurt, but the Peers had seen Alexandras' friends cover for him so frequently that they now thought I was tanking it.
Alexandros did too.
Get up, you outlander piece of shit! He straddled me in the dirt and hit me again when I rose.
For the first time I heard real killer instinct in his voice. The Peers heard it too and raised a shout of delight. Meanwhile the hounds, of whom there were never fewer than twenty after chow time, howled and bounded from every quarter in the turf-skimming fever that their masters' excited voices now drove them to.
I got up and hit Alexandros. I knew I could beat him easily, despite his crowd-impelled fury; I tried to pull my punch, just slightly so that no one would notice. They did. A howl of outrage rose from the Peers of the mess and others from adjacent syssitia, who had now clustered, forming a ring from which neither Alexandros nor I could escape.
Men's fists cuffed me hard about the ears. Fight him, you little fucker! The pack instinct had seized the hounds; they were at the verge of losing themselves to their animal nature. Suddenly two burst into the ring. One got in a nip at Alexandros before the men's sticks sent him scampering. That was it.
A spasm of the lungs seized Alexandros; his throat constricted, he began to choke. My punch hesitated. A three-foot switch burned my back. Hit him! I obeyed; Alexandros dropped to one knee. His lungs had frozen, he was helpless. Pound him, you whore's son! a voice shouted from behind me. Finish him! It was Dienekes.
His switch lashed me so hard it drove me to my knees. The delirium of voices overwhelmed the senses, all calling for me to polish Alexandros off. It was not anger at him. Nor were they rooting for me. The Peers could not have cared less about me. It was for him, to teach him, to make him eat the thousandth bitter lesson of the ten thousand more he would endure before they hardened him into the rock the city demanded and allowed him to take his place as an Equal and a warrior.
Alexandros knew it and rose with the fury of desperation, choking for breath; he charged like a boar. I felt the lash. I swung with everything I had.
Alexandros spun and dropped, face-first into the dirt, blood and spittle slinging from the side of his mouth.
He lay there, motionless as a dead man.
The Peers' shouting ceased instantly. Only the ungodly racket of the hounds continued at its maddening shrill pitch. Dienekes stepped across to the fallen form of his protege and knelt to feel his heart. In unconsciousness Alexandros' breath returned.
Dienekes' hand scraped the sputum from the boy's lips.
What are you gaping at! he barked at the circling Peers. It's over! Let him be!
The army marched out next morning for Antirhion. Leonidas strode at the fore, in full panoplia including slung shield, with his brow wreathed and his plumeless, unadorned helmet riding the rolled battle pack atop his scarlet cloak, his long steel-colored hair immaculately dressed and falling to his shoulders. About him marched the companion guard of the Knights, a half call-up, a hundred and fifty, with Polynikes in the forerank of honor beside six other Olympic victors. They marched not rigidly nor in grim silent lockstep, but at ease, talking and joking with one another and their families and friends along the roadside. Leonidas himself, were it not for his years and station of honor, could easily have been mistaken for a common infantryman, so unprepossessing was his armament, so nonchalant his demeanor. Yet all the city knew that this march-out, as the two previous beneath his command, was driven by his will and his will alone. It was aimed at the Persian invasion the king knew would come, perhaps not this year, perhaps not five years from now, but surely and inevitably.
The twin ports of Rhion and Antirhion commanded the western approach to the Gulf of Corinth.
This avenue threatened the Peloponnese and all of central Greece. Rhion, the near-side port, stood already within the Spartan hegemony; she was an ally. But Antirhion across the strait remained haughtily aloof, thinking herself beyond the reach of Lakedaemonian power. Leonidas meant to show her the error of her ways. He would bring her to heel and bottle up the gulf, protecting central Hellas from Persian sea assault, at least from the northwest.
Alexandras' father, Olympieus, marched past at the head of the Wild Olive regiment, with Meriones, the fifty-year-old battle captive and former Potidaean captain, beside him as his squire.
This gentle fellow possessed a grand beard, white as snow; he used to secrete little treasures within its bushy nest and pluck them forth, as surprise gifts, for Alexandras and his sisters when they were children. He did this now, straying to the roadside, to place in Alexandras' hand a tiny iron charm in the shape of a shield. Meriones clasped the boy's hand with a wink and moved on.
I stood in the crowd before the Hellenion with Alexandras and the other boys of the training platoons, the women and children, the whole city drawn up beneath the acacias and cypresses, singing the hymn to Castor, as the regiments trooped out along the Going-Away Street with their shields slung and spears at the slope, helmets lashed athwart the shoulders of their crimson cloaks, bobbing atop their polemothylakioi, the battle packs which the Peers bore now for show but which, like their armor, would be transferred, with all kit save spears and swords, to the shoulders of their squires when the army assumed column of march and stripped for the long, dusty hump north.
Alexandras' beautiful broken face remained a mask as Dienekes strode into view, flanked by his squire, Suicide, at the head of his platoon of the Herakles lochos. The main body of troops passed on. Leading and accompanying each regiment trudged the pack animals laden with the supplies of the commissariat and thwacked merrily on the rumps by the switches of their helot herd boys. The train of armament waggons passed next, already obscured within a churning storm of road dust; then followed the tall victualry waggons with their cargo of oil pots and wine jars, sacks of figs, olives, leeks, onions, pomegranates and the cooking pots and ladles swinging on hooks beneath them, banging into each other musically in the dust of the mules' tread, contributing a ringing metronomic air to the cacophony of cracking whips and squalling wheel rims, teamsters' bawls and groaning axles.
Behind the provisions bearers came the portable forges and armorers' kits with their spare xiphos blades and butt-spikes, lizard-stickers and long iron spear blades, then the spare eight-footers, uncured ash and cornel shafts lashed lengthwise along the waggon rails. Helot armorers strode in the cloud alongside, clad in their dogskin caps and aprons, forearms crisscrossed with the burn scars of the smithy.
Last of all trooped the sacrificial goats and sheep, with their horns wrapped and leashes held by the helot herd urchins, led by Dekton in his already road-begrimed altar-boy white, trailering a haltered ass laden with feed grain and two victory roosters in cages, one on either side of the cargo frame. He grinned when he passed, a little flash of contempt escaping his otherwise impeccably pious demeanor.
I was deep into slumber that night, on the stone of the portico behind the ephorate, when I felt a hand shake me awake. It was Agathe, the Spartan girl who had made Alexandras' charm to Polyhymnia. Get up, you! she hissed, so as not to alert the score of other youths of the agoge asleep and on watch around these public buildings. I blinked around. Alexandras, who had been asleep beside me, was gone. Hurry!
The girl melted at once into shadow. I followed her swiftly through the dark streets to that copse of the double-holed myrtle they called Dioscuri, the Twins, just west of the start of the Little Ring.
Alexandras was there. He had snuck away from his platoon without me (which would have put both of us, if caught, in line for a merciless whipping). He stood now, wearing his black pais' cloak and battle pack, confronted by his mother, the lady Paraleia, one of their male house helots and his two younger sisters. Hard words flew. Alexandras intended to follow the army to battle.
I'm going, he declared. Nothing will stop me.
I was ordered by Alexandras' mother to knock him down.
I saw something flash in his fist. His xyele, the sicklelike weapon all the boys carried. The women saw it too, and the deadly-grim look in the lad's eye. For a long moment, every form froze. The preposterousness of the situation was becoming more and more apparent, as was the adamantine resolution of the boy.
His mother straightened before him.
Go, then, the lady Paraleia addressed her son at last. She didn't need to add that I would go with him. And may God preserve you in the lashing you receive when you return.
It was not hard to follow the army. The track along the Oenous was churned to dust, ankle-deep.
At Selassia the perioikic Stephanos regiment had joined the expedition. Alexandros and I, arriving in the dark, could still make out the trodden-bare marshaling ground and the freshly dried blood upon the altar where the sacrifices had been performed and the omens taken. The army itself was half a day ahead; we could not stop for sleep, but pushed on all night.
At dawn we came upon men we recognized. A helot armorer named Eukrates had broken his leg in a fall and was being helped home by two of his fellows. He informed us that at the frontier fort of Oion fresh intelligence had reached Leonidas. The Antirhionians, far from rolling over and playing dead as the king had hoped, had sent envoys in secret, appealing for aid to the tyrannos Gelon in Sikelia. Gelon could appreciate as well as Leonidas and the Persians the strategic indispensability of the port of Antirhion; he wanted it too. Forty Syrakusan ships bearing two thousand citizen and mercenary heavy infantry were on their way to reinforce the Antirhionian defenders. It would be a real battle after all.
The Spartan force pressed on through Tegea. The Tegeates, member allies of the Peloponnesian League and obligated to follow the Spartans whithersoever they should lead, reinforced the army with six hundred of their own heavy infantry, swelling its fighting total to beyond four thousand. Leonidas had not been seeking parataxis, a pitched battle, with the Antirhionians.
Rather he had hoped to overawe them with a show of such force that they would perceive the folly of defiance and enroll themselves of their own free will in the alliance against the Persians.
Among Dekton's herd was a wrapped bull, brought in anticipation of celebration, of festive sacrifice in honor of this new addition to the League. But the Antirhionians, perhaps bought by Gelon's gold, inflamed by the rhetoric of some glory-hungry demagogue or betrayed by a lying oracle, had chosen to make a fight of it.
When Alexandros spoke to the helots on the road, he had queried them for intelligence on the specific makeup of the Syrakusan forces: which units, under which commanders, reinforced by which auxiliaries. The helots didn't know. In any army other than the Spartan, such ignorance would have provoked a fierce tongue-lashing or worse. Yet Alexandros let it go without a thought.
Among the Lakedaemonians, it is considered a matter of indifference of whom and in what the enemy consists.
The Spartans are schooled to regard the foe, any foe, as nameless and faceless. In their minds it is the mark of an ill-prepared and amateur army to rely in the moments before battle on what they call pseudoandreia, false courage, meaning the artificially inflated martial frenzy produced by a general's eleventh-hour harangue or some peak of bronze-banging bravado built to by shouting, shield-pounding and the like. In Alexandros' mind, which already at age fourteen mirrored that of the generals of his city, one Syrakusan was as good as the next, one enemy strategos no different from another. Let the foe be Mantinean, Olynthian, Epidaurian; let him come in elite units or hordes of shrieking rabble, crack citizen regiments or foreign mercenaries hired for gold. It made no difference. None was a match for the warriors of Lakedaemon, and all knew it.
Among the Spartans the work of war is demystified and depersonalized through its vocabulary, which is studded with references both agrarian and obscene. Their word which I translated earlier as fuck, as in the youths' tree-fucking, bears the connotation not so much of penetration as of grinding, like a miller's stone. The front three ranks fuck or mill the enemy. The verb to kill, in Doric theros, is the same as to harvest. The warriors in the fourth through sixth ranks are sometimes called harvesters, both for the work they do on the trampled enemy with the butt-spike lizard-stickers of their eight-footers and for that pitiless threshing stroke they make with the short xiphos sword, which itself is often called a reaper. To decapitate a man is to top him off or give him a haircut. Chopping off a hand or arm is called limbing.
Alexandros and I arrived at Rhion, at the bluff overlooking the army's embarkation port, a little after midnight of the third day. The port lights of Antirhion shone, clearly visible across the narrow strait. The embarkation beaches were already packed with men and boys, women and children, a thronging festive mob gathered to watch the spectacle of the fleet of galleys and coasters, conscripted merchantmen, ferries and even fishing boats assembled in advance by the allied Rhionians to transport the army in darkness west along the coast, out of sight of Antirhion, then across the gulf where it stood widest, some five miles down. Leonidas, respecting the seafighting reputation of the Antirhionians, had elected to make this passage at night.
Among the blufftop farewell-bawlers Alexandros and I located a boy our age whose father, he claimed, owned a fast smack and would not be averse to pocketing the wad of Attic drachmas clutched in AlexandrosI fist in exchange for a swift silent crossing, no questions asked. The boy led us down through the crush of spectators and merrymakers to an obscure launching beach called the Ovens, behind an unlighted breakwater. Not twenty minutes after the last Spartan transport had cast off, we were on the water too, trailing the fleet out of sight to the west.
I fear the sea anytime, but never more than on a moonless night and in the hands of strangers.
Our captain had insisted on bringing along his two brothers, though a man and a boy could easily handle the light swift craft. I have known these coasters and man jacks and mistrust them; the brothers, if indeed that's what they were, were hulking louts barely capable of speech, with beards so dense they began just below the eyeline and extended thick as fur to the matted pelts of their chests.
An hour passed. The smack was making far too much speed; across the dark water the plash of the transports' oar-blades and even the creaking of looms against tholepins carried easily.
Alexandros ordered the pirate twice to retard his progress, but the man tossed it off with a laugh.
We were downwind, he said, no one could hear us, and even if they did they would take us for part of the convoy, or one of the spectator boats, trailing to catch the action.
Sure enough, as soon as the belly of the coastline had swallowed the lights of Rhion behind us, a Spartan cutter emerged out of the black and made way to intercept us. Doric voices hailed the smack and ordered her to heave-to. Suddenly our skipper demanded his money. When we land, Alexandros insisted, as agreed. The beards clamped oars in their fists like weapons. Cutter's getting closer, boys. How will it go with you if you're caught?
Give him nothing, Alexandros, I hissed.
But the boy perceived the precariousness of our predicament. Of course, Captain. It will be my pleasure.
The pirate accepted his fare, grinning like Charon on the ferry to hell. Now, lads. Over the side with you.
We were smack in the middle of the widest part of the gulf.
Our boatman indicated the Spartan cutter bearing swiftly down. Catch a line and keep under the stem while I feed these lubbers a yard of shit. The beards loomed. Soon as we talk these fools off, we'll haul you back aboard none the worse for wear.
Over we went. Up came the cutter. We heard the scrape of a knife blade through rope.
The line came off in our hands.
Happy landings, lads!
In a flash the smack's steering oar bit deep into the swell, the two worthless brutes suddenly showed themselves anything but. Three swift heaves on the driving oars and the smack shot off like a sling bullet.
We were cast adrift in the middle of the channel.
The cutter came up, calling after the smack as she sped from sight. The Spartans still hadn't seen us. Alexandras clamped my arm. We must not sing out, that would mean dishonor.
I agree. Drowning's a lot more honorable.
Shut up.
We held silent, treading water while the cutter quartered the area, scanning for other craft that might be spies. Finally she showed her stern and rowed off. We were alone beneath the stars.
As vast as the sea can look from the deck of a ship, it looks even bigger from a single handbreadth above the surface.
Which shore do we make for?
Alexandros gave me a look as if I had lost my senses. Of course we would go forward.
We paddled for what seemed like hours. The shore had not crawled one spear-length closer.
What if the current's against us? For all we know we're stuck here in place, or even drifting backward.
We're closer, Alexandros insisted.
Your eyes must be better than mine.
There was nothing to do but paddle and pray. What monsters of the sea prowled at this moment beneath our feet, ready to snare our legs in their horrible coils, or shear us off at the kneecaps? I could hear Alexandros gulp water, fighting an asthmatic fit.
We pulled closer together. Our eyes were gumming up from the salt; our arms felt like lead.
Tell me a story, Alexandros said.
For a moment I feared he was going mad.
To encourage each other. Keep our spirits up. Tell me a story.
I recited some verses from the Iliad which Bruxieus had made Diomache and me commit to memory, our second summer in the hills. I was getting the hexameters out of order but Alexandros didn't care; the words seemed to fortify him greatly.
Dienekes says the mind is like a house with many rooms, he said. There are rooms one must not go into. To anticipate one's death is one of those rooms. We must not allow ourselves even to think it.
He instructed me to continue, selecting only verses of valor. He declared that we must under no circumstances give thought to failure. I think the gods may have dropped us here on purpose. To teach us about those rooms.
We paddled on. Orion the Hunter had stood overhead when we began; now his arc descended, halfway down the sky, The shore stood as far off as ever.
Do you know Agathe, Ariston's sister? Alexandros asked out of nowhere. I'm going to marry her. I've never told anyone that.
Congratulations.
You think I'm joking. But my thoughts have kept coming back to her for hours, or however long we've been out here. He was serious. Do you think she'll have me?
It made as much sense to debate this in the middle of the ocean as anything else. Your family outranks hers. If your father asks, hers will have to say yes.
I don't want her that way. You've watched her. Tell me the truth. Will she have me? I considered it. She made you that amber charm. Her eyes never leave you when you sing. She comes out to the Big Ring with her sisters when we run. She pretends to be training, but she's really sneaking looks at you.
This seemed to cheer Alexandros mightily. Let's make a push. Twenty minutes as strong as we can, and see how far we can get.
When we hit twenty, we decided to try for another.
You have a girl you love too, don't you? Alexandros asked as we paddled. From your city.
The girl you lived in the hills with, your cousin who went to Athens.
I said it was impossible that he could know all that.
He laughed. I know everything. I hear it from the girls and the goat boys and from your helot friend Dekton. He said he wanted to know more about this girl of yours.
I told him I wouldn't tell him.
I can help you to see her. My great-uncle is proxenos for Athens. He can have her found, and brought to the city if you wish.
The swells were getting bigger; a cold wind had gotten up. We were going nowhere. I supported Alexandros again as another choking fit attacked him. He stuck his thumb between his teeth and bit through the flesh till it bled. The pain seemed to steady him. Dienekes says that warriors advancing into battle must speak steadily and calmly to each other, each man encouraging his mate. We have to keep talking, Xeo.
The mind plays tricks in conditions of such extremity. I cannot tell how much I spoke aloud to Alexandros over the succeeding hours and how much simply swam before memory's eye as we labored endlessly toward the shore that refused to come closer.
I know I told him of Bruxieus. If my knowledge of Homer was worthy, all credit lay with this fortune-cursed man, sightless as the poet himself, and his fierce will that I and my cousin not grow to adulthood wild and unlettered in the hills.
This man was mentor to you, Alexandros pronounced gravely, as Dienekes is to me. He wished to hear more. What was it like to lose mother and father, to watch your city burn? How long did you and your cousin remain in the hills? How did you get food, and how protect yourself from the elements and wild beasts?
In gulps and snatches, I told him.
By our second summer in the mountains, Diomache and I had become such accomplished hunters that not only did we no longer need to descend to town or farm for food, we no longer wished to.
We were happy in the hills. Our bodies were growing. We had meat, not once or twice a month or on festival occasions only, as in our fathers' houses, but every day, with every meal.
Here was our secret. We had found dogs.
Two puppies to be exact, runts of a disowned litter. Arkadian shepherd's hounds we had discovered shivering and suckling-blind, abandoned by their mother, who had untimely given birth in midwinter. We named one Happy and the other Lucky, and they were. By spring both had legs to run, and by summer their instincts had made them hunters. With those dogs our hungry days were over. We could track and kill anything that breathed. We could sleep with both eyes closed and know that nothing could take us unawares. We became such a proficient hunting team, Dio and I and the hounds, that we actually passed up opportunities, came upon game and let it go with the benevolence of gods. We feasted like lords and viewed the sweating valley farmers and plodding highland goatherds with contempt.
Bruxieus began to fear for us. We were growing wild. Cityless. In evenings past, Bruxieus had recited Homer and made it a game how many verses we could repeat without a slip. Now this exercise took on a deadly earnestness for him. He was failing, we all knew it. He would not be with us much longer. Everything he knew, he must pass on.
Homer was our school, the Iliad and Odyssey the texts of our curriculum. Over and over Bruxieus had us recite the verses upon Odysseus' return, when, clad in rags and unrecognizable as the rightly lord of Ithaka, the hero of Troy seeks shelter at the hut of Eumaeus, the swineherd.
Though Eumaeus has no idea that the traveler at his gate is his true king, and thinks him only another cityless beggar, yet out of respect to Zeus, who protects the wayfarer, he invites the wanderer kindly in and shares with him his humble fare.
This was humility, hospitality, graciousness toward the stranger; we must imbibe it, sink it deep within our bones. Bruxieus tutored us relentlessly in compassion, that virtue which he saw diminishing each day within our mountain-hardened hearts. We were made to recite the tent scene at the close of the Iliad, when Priam of Troy kneels before Achilles to kiss in supplication the hand of the man who has slain his sons, including the mightiest and dearest to him, Hektor, hero and protector of Ilium. Then Bruxieus grilled us upon it. What would we have done were we Achilles? Were we Priam? Was each man's action proper and pious in the eyes of the gods?
We must have a city, Bruxieus declared.
Without a city we were no better than the wild brutes we hunted and killed.
Athens,
There, Bruxieus insisted, was where Dio and I must go. The city of Athena was the only truly open city in Hellas, her freest and most civilized. The love of wisdom, philosophia, was esteemed in Athens beyond all other pursuits; the life of the mind was cultivated and honored, invigorated by a high culture of theater, music, poetry, architecture and the arts. Nor were the Athenians inferior to any city in Hellas in the practice of war.
The Athenians welcomed immigrants. A bright strong boy like me could take a trade, indenture himself in a shop. And Athens had a fleet. Even with my crippled hands I could pull an oar. With my skill with the bow I could become a toxotes, a marine archer, distinguish myself in war and exploit that service to advance my position.
Athens, too, was where Diomache must go. As a well-spoken freeborn, and with her blooming beauty, she could find service in a respected house and attract no shortage of admirers. She was at just the right age for a bride; it was far from a stretch to imagine her securing betrothal to a citizen. As the wife even of a metik, a resident alien, she could protect me, aid me in securing employment. And we would have each other.
As Bruxieus' strength diminished with the passing weeks, his conviction intensified that we follow his will in these matters. He made us swear that when his time came, we would go down from the hills and make for Attika, to the city of Athena. In October of that second year Dio and I hunted one long cold-coming day and kilted nothing. We tramped back into camp, grumbling at each other, anticipating a mean porridge of mixed pulse and mountain peas and, worse, the sight of Bruxieus, whose slackening constitution was each day becoming more painful to behold, maintaining that all was well with him; he did not need meat. We saw his smoke and watched the dogs bound up the hill as they loved to, sprinting to their friend to receive his hugs and homecoming roughhouse.
From the trail's turn below the camp we heard their barking. Not the usual squeals of play, but something keener, more insistent, Happy scrambled into view a hundred feet above us. Diomache looked at me and we both knew.
It took an hour to build Bruxieus' pyre. When his gaunt slave-branded body lay at last within the purifying flame, I lit a pitched arrow from the hollow above his heart and loosed it, flaming, with all my strength, arcing like a comet down the dark valley… then aged Nestor, peerless in wisdom among the flowing-haired Achaeans, laid himself down in the fullness of years and closed his eyes as if in sleep, slain by Artemis' gentle darts.
Ten dawns later Diomache and I stood at the Three-Cornered Way, on the frontier of Attika and Megara, where the Athens road breaks off to the east, the Sacred Road to Delphi and the west and the Corinthian southwest, to the Isthmus and the Peloponnese. No doubt we looked like the most savage pair of ragamuffins, barefoot, faces scorched by the sun, our long hair tied in horsetails behind us. Both of us carried daggers and bows, and the dogs loped beside us, as burrcoated and filthy as we were.
Traffic lumbered through the Three Corners, the predawn vehicles, freighters and produce waggons, firewood haulers, farm urchins on their way to market with their cheeses and eggs and sacks of onions, just as Dio and I had started out for Astakos that morning that seemed so long ago and yet was only two winters by the calendar. We halted at the crossroads and asked directions. Yes, a teamster pointed, Athens was that way, two hours, no more.
My cousin and I had barely spoken on the weeklong tramp down from the mountains. We were thinking of cities and what our new life would be like. I watched the other travelers when they passed on the highway, how they eyed her. The need was on her to be a woman. I want babies, she said out of the blue, the last day as we marched. I want a husband to care for and to care for me. I want a home. I don't care how humble, just someplace I can have a little garden, put flowers on the sill and make it pretty for my husband and our children. This was her way of being kind to me, of drawing a distance beforehand, so I would have time to absorb it. Can you understand, Xeo?
I understood. Which dog do you want?
Don't be cross with me. I'm only trying to tell you how things are, and how they must be.
We decided she would take Lucky, and I would keep Happy.
We can stay together in the city, she thought out loud as we walked. We'll tell the people we're brother and sister. But you must understand, Xeo, if I find a decent man, someone who will treat me with respect…
I understand. You can stop talking now.
Two days before, a gentlewoman of Athens had passed us on the highway, traveling by coach with her husband and a merry party of friends and servants. The lady had been taken by the sight of this wild girl, Diomache, and insisted upon having her sewing women bathe and oil her and dress her hair. She wanted to do mine too, but I wouldn't let them near me. Their whole party stopped by a shaded stream and entertained themselves with cakes and wine while the maids took Dio away and groomed her. When my cousin emerged, I didn't recognize her. The Athenian lady was beside herself with delight; she couldn't stop praising Dio's charms, nor anticipating the stir her blossoming beauty would create among the young bloods of the city. The lady insisted that Dio and I proceed straight to her husband's home the moment we arrived in Athens; she would look to our employment and the continuation of our schooling. Her manservant would await us at the Thriasian Gates. Just ask anyone. We tramped on, that last long day. On the freighters that passed now we could read the words Phaleron and Athens scrawled on the destination bands of serried wine jars and crated merchandise. Accents were becoming Attic. We stopped to watch a troop of Athenian cavalry, out on a lark. Four seamen marched past, heading for the city, each balancing his oar upon his shoulder and carrying his strap and cushion- That would be me before long.
Always in rhe hills Dio and I had slept in each other's arms, not as lovers, but for warmth. These final nights on the road, she wrapped herself in her own cloak and took her sleep apart. At last we arrived at dawn before the Three Corners. I had stopped and was watching a freight waggon pass. I could feel my cousin's eyes upon me.
You're not coming, are you?
I said nothing.
She knew which fork I would be taking.
Bruxieus will be angry with you, she said.
Dio and I had learned, from the dogs and on the hunt, how to communicate with just a look. I told her good-bye with my eyes and begged her to understand, She would be well cared for in this city. Her life as a woman was just beginning.
The Spartans will be cruel to you, Diomache said. The dogs paced impatiently at our feet. They did not yet know that they were parting too. Dio took my hands in both of hers. And will we never sleep in each other's arms again, cousin?
It must have seemed a queer spectacle to the teamsters and farm boys passing, the sight of these two wild children embracing upon the roadside, with their slung bows and dag' gers and their cloaks bound into traveler's rolls upon their backs.
Diomache took her road and I took mine. She was fifteen. I was twelve.
How much of this I imparted to Alexandros in those hours in the water, I cannot say. Dawn had still not shown her face when I finished. We were clinging to a miserable floating spar, barely big enough to support one, and too exhausted to swim another stroke. The water was getting colder. Hypothermia gripped our limbs; I heard Alexandros cough and sputter, struggling for the strength to speak.
We have to quit this spar. If we don't, we'll die.
My eyes strained toward the north. Peaks could be made out, but the shore itself remained invisible. Alexandras' cold hand clasped mine.
Whatever happens, he swore, I will not abandon you.
He let go of the spar. I followed.
An hour later we collapsed like Odysseus on a rock beach beneath a bawling rookery. We gulped fresh water from a cliff-wall spring, washed the salt from our hair and eyes and knelt in thanksgiving for our deliverance. For half the morning we slept like the dead. I climbed for eggs, which we wolfed raw from the shell, standing on the sand in the rags of our garments.
Thank you, my friend, Alexandros said very quietly.
He extended his hand; I took it.
Thank you too.
The sun stood near its zenith; our salt-stiff cloaks had dried upon our backs.
Let's get moving, Alexandros said. We've lost half a day.
The battle took place on a dusty plain to the west of the I city of Antirhion, within bowshot of the beach and immediately beneath the citadel walls. A desultory stream, the Akanathus, meandered across the plain, bisecting it at the midpoint. Perpendicular to this watercourse, along the seaward flank, the Antirhionians had thrown up a crude battle wall. Rugged hills sealed the enemy's left. A portion of the plain adjacent the wall was occupied by a maritime junkyard; rotting craft lay littered at all angles, extending halfway across the field, amid tumbledown work shacks and stinking mounds of debris squalled over by wheeling flocks of gulls. In addition the enemy had strewn boulders and driftwood to break up the flat over which Leonidas and his men must advance. Their own side, the foe's, had been cleared smooth as a schoolmaster's desk.
When Alexandros and I scurried breathless and tardy upon the site, the Spartan Skiritai rangers had just finished setting the enemy refuse yards ablaze. The armies yet stood in formation, twofifths of a mile apart, with the burning hulks between them. All native merchantmen and fishing craft had been withdrawn by the enemy, either hauled to safety within the fortified portion of the anchorage or standing offshore beyond the invaders' reach. This did not deter the Skiritai from torching the wharves and warehouses of the harbor.
The timbers of the ship sheds the rangers had saturated with naphtha; already they blazed in ruins to the waterline. The defenders of Antirhion, as Leonidas and the Spartans well knew, were militiamen, farmers and potters and fishermen, summertime soldiers like my father. The devastation of their harbor was meant to unnerve them, to dislocate their faculties unaccustomed to such sights and sear into their unseasoned senses the stink and scourge of coming slaughter. It was morning, about market time, and the shore breeze had gotten up. Black smoke from the careened wrecks began to obscure the field; the pitch and encaustic of their timbers blazed with fury, abetted by the wind, which turned the debris-pile smudge bums into howling bonfires.
Alexandros and I had secured a vantage along the landward bluff, no more than a furlong above the site where the massed formations must clash. The smoke was already gagging us. We made our way across the slope. Others had claimed the site before us, boys and older men of Antirhion, armed with bows, slings and missile weapons they meant to hurl down upon the Spartans as they advanced, but these light-armed forces had been cleared early by the Skiritai, whose comrades below would advance as always from their position of honor on the Lakedaemonian left. The rangers took possession of half the face, driving the enemy skirmishers back where their slings and shafts were outranged and could work no harm to the army.
Directly beneath us, an eighth of a mile away, the Spartans and their allies were marshaling into their ranks. Squires armed the warriors from the feet up, starting with the heavy oxhide soles which could tread over fire; then the bronze greaves, which the squires bent into place around the shins of their masters, securing them at the rear of the calf by the flex of the metal alone. We could see Alexandras' father, Olympieus, and the white beard of his squire, Mer-iones.
The troops bound their private parts next, accompanied by obscene humor as each warrior mocksolemnly saluted his manhood and offered a prayer that he and it would still be acquainted when the day was over.
This process of arming for battle, which the citizen-soldiers of other poleis had practiced no more than a dozen times a year in the spring and summer training, the Spartans had rehearsed and rerehearsed, two hundred, four hundred, six hundred times each campaigning season. Men in their fifties had done this ten thousand times. It was as second-nature to them as oiling or dusting their limbs before wrestling or dressing their long hair, which they, fitted now with the linen spolas corselet and bronze breastplate, proceeded to do with elaborate care and ceremony, assisting one another like a regiment of dandies preparing for a dress ball, all the while radiating an eerie presence of calm and nonchalance.
Finally the men scribed their names or signs upon skytalides, the improvised twig bracelets they called tickets, which would distinguish their bodies should they, falling, be maimed too hideously to be identified. They used wood because it was valueless as plunder by the enemy.
Behind the massing men, the omens were being taken. Shields, helmets and foot-long spearpoints had been burnished to a minor's gleam; they flashed brilliantly in the sun, investing the massed formation with the appearance of some colossal milling machine, made not so much of men as of bronze and iron.
Now the Spartans and Tegeates advanced to their positions in the line. First the Skiritai, on the left, forty-eight shields across and eight deep; next the Selassian Stephanos, the Laurel regiment, eleven hundred perioikic hoplites. To the right of these massed the six hundred heavy infantry of Tegea; then the agema of the Knights in the line's center, Polynikes prominent among them, thirty shields across and five deep, to fight around and protect the person of the king. Right of these, dressing their line, moved into place the Wild Olive regiment, a hundred and forty-four across, with the Panther battalion adjacent the Knights, then the Huntress with Olympieus in the forerank, and the Menelaion. On their right, already to their marks, massed the battalions of the Herakles, another hundred and forty-four across, with Dienekes clearly visible at the head of his thirty-six-man enomotia, dividing now into four nine-man files, or stichoi, anchoring the right.
The total, excluding armed squires ranging as auxiliaries, exceeded forty-five hundred and extended wing to wing across the plain for nearly six hundred meters.
From our vantage, Alexandros and I could see Dekton, as tall and muscular as any of the warriors, unarmored in his altar-boy white, leading two she-goats swiftly out to Leoni-das, who stood garlanded with the battle priests before the formation in readiness for the sacrifice. Two goats were needed in case the first bled inpropitiously. The commanders' postures, like those of the massed warriors, projected an air of absolute insouciance.
Across from these the Antirhionians and their Syrakusan allies had massed in their numbers, the same width as the Spartans but six or more shields deeper. The scrapyard hulks had now burned down to ashy skeletons, spewing a blanket of smoke across the field. Beyond these, the stones of the harbor sizzled black in the water, while the spikes of burned-black wharf timbers protruded from the flotsam-choked surface like burial stones; a clotted ash-colored haze obscured what was left of the waterfront.
The wind bore the smoke upon the enemy, upon the massed individuals, the sinews of whose knees and shoulders shivered and quaked beneath the weight of their unaccustomed armor, while their hearts hammered in their breasts and the blood sang in their ears. It took no diviner's gift to discern their state of agitation. Watch their spearpoints, Alexandros said, pointing to the massed foe as they jostled and jockeyed into their ranks. See them tremble. Even the plumes on their helmets are quaking. I looked. In the Spartan line the iron-bladed forest of eight-footers rose solid as a spike fence, each shaft upright and aligned, dressed straight as a geometer's line and none moving. Across among the enemy, shafts wove and wobbled; all save the Syrakusans in the center were misaligned in rank and file. Some shafts actually clattered against their neighbors', chattering like teeth.
Alexandros was tallying the battalions in the Syrakusans' ranks. He made their total at twentyfour hundred shields, with twelve to fifteen hundred mercenaries and an additional three thousand citizen militiamen from the city of Antirhion herself. The enemy's numbers totaled half again that of the Spartans'. It was not enough and the foe knew it.
Now the clamor began.
Among the enemy's ranks, the bravest (or perhaps the most fear-stricken) began banging the ash of their spear shafts upon the bronze bowls of their shields, creating a tumult of pseudoandreia which reverberated across and around the mountain-enclosed plain. Others reinforced this racket with the warlike thrusting of their spearpoints to heaven and the loosing of cries to the gods and shouts of threat and anger. The roar multiplied threefold, then five, and ten, as the enemy rear ranks and flankers picked the clamor up and contributed their own bluster and bronze-bangingSoon the entire fifty-four hundred were bellowing the war cry. Their commander thrust his spear forward and the mass surged behind him into the advance.
The Spartans had neither moved nor made a sound.
They waited patiently in their scarlet-cloaked ranks, neither grim nor rigid, but speaking quietly to each other words of encouragement and cheer, securing the final preparation for actions they had rehearsed hundreds of times in training and performed dozens and scores more in battle.
Here came the foe, picking up the pace of his advance. A fast walk. A swinging stride. The line was extending and fanning open to the right, winging out as men in fear edged into the shadow of the shield of the comrade on their right; already one could see the enemy ranks stagger and fall from alignment as the bravest surged forward and the hesitant shrank back. Leonidas and the priests still stood exposed out front.
The shallow stream yet waited before the enemy. The foe's generals, expecting the Spartans to advance first, had formed their lines so that this watercourse stood midway between the armies.
In the enemy's plan, no doubt, the sinuous defile of the river would disorder the Lakedaemonian ranks and render them vulnerable at the moment of attack. The Spartans, however, had outwaited them. As soon as the bronze-banging began, the enemy commanders knew they could not restrain their ranks longer; they must advance while their men's blood was up, or all fervor would dissipate and terror flood inevitably into the vacuum.
Now the river worked against the enemy. His foreranks descended into the defile, yet a quarter mile from the Spartans. Up they came, their already disordered dress and interval disintegrating further. They were again on the flat now, but with the river to their rear, the most perilous place it could be in the event of a rout.
Leonidas stood patiently watching, flanked by the battle priests and Dekton with his goats. The enemy was now a fifth of a mile off and accelerating the pace of his advance. The Spartans still hadn't moved. Dekton handed over the first she-goat's leash. We could see him glancing apprehensively as the plain began to thunder from the pounding of the enemy's feet and the air commenced to ring with their fear- and rage-inspired cries.
Leonidas performed the sphagia, crying aloud to Artemis Huntress and the Muses, then piercing with his own sword the throat of the sacrificial goat whose haunches he pinned from behind with his knees, his left hand hauling the beast's jaw exposed as the blade thrust through its throat. No eye in the formation failed to see the blood gush and spill into Gaia, maternal earth, splattering as it fell Leonidas' bronze greaves and painting crimson his feet in their oxhide battle soles.
The king turned, with the life-fled victim yet clamped between his knees, to face the Skiritai, Spartiates, perioikoi and Tegeates, who still held, patient and silent, in their massed ranks. He extended his sword, dark and dripping the blood of holy sacrifice, first heavenward toward the gods whose aid he now summoned, then around, toward the fast-advancing enemy.
Zeus Savior and Eros! his voice thundered, eclipsed but not unheard in that cacophonous din.
Lakedaemon!
The salpinx sounded Advance! trumpeters sustaining the eardrum-numbing note ten paces after the men had stepped off, and now the pipers' wail cut through, shrill notes of their auloi piercing the melee like the cry of a thousand Furies. Dekton heaved the butchered goat and the live one over his shoulders and scampered like hell for the safety of the ranks.
To the beat the Spartans and their allies advanced, eight-footers at the upright, their honed and polished spearpoints flashing in the sun. Now the foe broke into an all-out charge. Leonidas, displaying neither haste nor urgency, fell into step in his place in the front rank as it advanced to envelop him, with the Knights flowing impeccably into position upon his right and left.
Now from the Lakedaemonian ranks rose the paean, the hymn to Castor ascending from four thousand throats. On the climactic beat of the second stanza, Heaven-shining brother Skiborne hero the spears of the first three ranks snapped from the vertical into the attack.
Words cannot convey the impact of awe and terror produced upon the foe, any foe, by this seemingly uncomplex maneuver, called in Lakedaemon spiking it or palming the pine, so simple to perform on the parade ground and so formidable under conditions of life and death. To behold it executed with such precision and fearlessness, no man surging forward out of control nor hanging back in dread, none edging right into the shadow of his rankmate's shield, but all holding solid and unbreakable, tight as the scales on a serpent's flank, the heart stopped in awe, the hair stood straight up upon the neck and shivers coursed powerfully the length of the spine.
As when some colossal beast, brought to bay by the hounds, wheels in his fury, bristling with rage and baring his fangs, and plants himself in the power and fearlessness of his strength, so did the bronze and crimson phalanx of the Lakedaemonians now snap as one into its mode of murder.
The left wing of the enemy, eighty across, collapsed even before the shields of their promachoi, the front-rankers, had come within thirty paces of the Spartans. A cry of dread rose from the throats of the foe, so primal it froze the blood, and then was swallowed in the tumult.
The enemy left broke from within.
This wing, whose advancing breadth had stood an instant earlier at forty-eight shields, abruptly became thirty, then twenty, then ten as panic flared like a gale-driven fire from terror-stricken pockets within the massed formation. Those in the first three ranks who turned in flight now collided with their comrades advancing from the rear. Shield rim caught upon shield rim, spear shaft upon spear shaft; a massive tangle of flesh and bronze ensued as men bearing seventy pounds of shield and armor stumbled and fell, becoming obstacles and impediments to their own advancing comrades. You could see the brave men stride on in the advance, crying out in rage to their countrymen as these abandoned them. Those who still clung to courage pushed past those who had forsaken it, calling out in outrage and fury, trampling the forerankers, or else, as valor deserted them too, jerked free and fled to save their own skins.
At the height of the foe's confusion the Spartan right fell upon them. Now even the bravest of the enemy broke. Why should a man, however valorous, stand and die while right and left, fore and rear, his fellows deserted him? Shields were flung, spears cast wildly to the turf. Half a thousand men wheeled on their heels and stampeded in terror. At that instant the center and right of the enemy's line crashed shields-on into the central corps of the Spartans.
That sound which all warriors know but which to Alexandras' and my youthful ears had been heretofore unknown and unheard now ascended from the clash and collision of the othismos.
Once, at home when I was a child, Bruxieus and! had helped our neighbor Pierion relocate three of his stacked wooden beehives. As we jockeyed the stack into place upon its new stand, someone's foot slipped. The stacked hives dropped. From within those stoppered confines yet clutched in our hands arose such an alarum, neither shriek nor cry, growl nor roar, but a thrum from the netherworld, a vibration of rage and murder that ascended not from brain or heart, but from the cells, the atoms of the massed poleis within the hives.
This selfsame sound, multiplied a hundred-thousandfold, now rose from the massed compacted crush of men and armor roiling beneath us on the plain. Now I understood the poet's phrase the mill of Ares and apprehended in my flesh why the Spartans speak of war as work. I felt Alexandras' fingernails dig into the flesh of my arm.
Can you see my father? Do you see Dienekes?
Dienekes waded into the rout below us; we could see his cross-crested curry brush at the right of the Herakles, in the fore of the third platoon. As disordered as were the ranks of the enemy, so held the Spartans' intact and cohesive. Their forerank did not charge wildly upon the foe, flailing like savages, nor did they advance with the stolid precision of the parade ground. Rather they surged, in unison, like a line of warships on the ram. I had never appreciated how far beyond the interleaved bronze of the promachoi's shields the murderous iron of their eight-footers could extend. These punched and struck, overhand, driven by the full force of the right arm and shoulder, across the upper rim of the shield; not just the spears of the front-rankers but those of the second and even the third, extending over their mates' shoulders to form a thrashing engine that advanced like a wall of murder. As wolves in a pack take down the fleeing deer, so did the Spartan right fall upon the defenders of Antirhion, not in frenzied shrieking rage, lip-curled and fang-bared, but predator-like, cold-blooded, applying the steel with the wordless cohesion of the killing pack and the homicidal efficiency of the hunt.
Dienekes was turning them. Wheeling his platoon to take the enemy in flank. They were in the smoke now. It became impossible to see. Dust rose in such quantities beneath the churning feet of the men, commingling with the screen of smoke from the tindered hulks, that the entire plain seemed afire, and from the choking cloud arose that sound, that terrible indescribable sound. We could sense rather than see the Herakles lochos, directly beneath us where the dust and smoke were thinner. They had routed the enemy left; their front ranks now surged into the business of cutting down those luckless bastards who had fallen or been trampled or whose panic-unstrung knees could not find strength to bear them swiftly enough from their own slaughter. On the center and right, along the whole line the Spartans and Syrakusans clashed now shield-to-shield, helmet-to-helmet. Amid the maelstrom we could catch only glimpses, and those primarily of the rear-rankers, eight deep on the Lakedaemonian side, twelve and sixteen deep on the Syrakusan, as they thrust the three-foot-wide bowls of their hoplon shields flush against the backs of the men in file before them and heaved and ground and shoved with all their strength, the soles of their footgear churning up trenches in the plain and slinging yet more dust into the already choking air.
No longer was it possible to distinguish individual men, or even units. We could see only the tidal surge and back-surge of the massed formations and hear without ceasing that terrible, bloodstill ing sound.
As when a flood descends from the mountains and the wall of water crashes down the dry courses, smashing into the stone-founded stakes and woven brush of the husbandman's dam, so did the Spartan line surge against the massed weight of the Syrakusans. The dam's bulk, founded as firmly against the flood as fear and forethought may devise, seems itself to dig in and hold, to plant its force fiercely into the earth, and for long moments displays no sign of buckling. But then, as the anxious planter watches, before his eyes a surge begins to capsize one deep-sunken stake, another rush undermines a stacked stone revetment. Into each fraction of a breach, the force and weight of the downrushing wave thrusts itself irresistibly, hammering deeper, tearing and gouging, widening the gap and exploiting it with each successive ripping surge.
Now the dam wall which had cracked only a hand-breadth splits to a foot and then a yard. The mass of the plunging flood builds upon itself, as ton upon ton plummets in from the courses above, adding its weight to the irresistible ever-mounting tide. Along the banked margins of the watercourse, sheets of earth calve into the churning, boiling torrent. So now did the Syrakusan center, pounded and hammered by the Tegeate heavy infantry, the king and the Knights and the massed battalions of the Wild Olive, begin to peel and founder.
The Skiritai had routed the enemy right. From the left the battalions of the Herakles rolled up the enemy flank. Each Syrakusan wingman forced to wheel to defend his unshielded side meant another drawn off from the forward push against the frontally advancing Spartans. The sound of the keening struggle seemed to rise for a moment, then went dead silent as desperate men summoned every reserve of valor from their shrieking, exhausted limbs. An eternity passed in the time it takes to draw a dozen breaths, and then, with the same sickening sound made by the mountain dam as it gives way unable to withstand the onrushing torrent, the Syrakusan line cracked and broke.
Now in the dust and fire of the plain the slaughter began.
A shout, half of joy and half of awe, sprung from the throats of the crimson-tunicked Spartans.
Back the Syrakusan line fell, not in rout and riot as their allies the An-tirhionians had done, but in still-disciplined squads and bunches, held yet by their officers, or whatever brave men had taken it upon themselves to act as officers, maintaining their shields to the fore and closing ranks as they retreated. It was no use. The Spartan front-rankers, men of the first five age-classes, were the cream of the city in foot speed and strength, none save the officers over twenty-five years old.
Many, like Polynikes in the van among the Knights, were sprinters of Olympic and near-Olympic stature with garland after garland won in games before the gods.
These now, loosed by Leonidas and driven on by their own lust for glory, pressed home the sentence of steel upon the fleeing Syrakusans.
When the trumpeters had blown the salpinx and its mind-numbing wail sounded the call to still the slaughter, even the rawest untrained eye could read the field like a book.
There, on the Spartan right where the Herakles regiment had routed the Antirhionians, one saw the turf unchurned and the field beyond littered with enemy shields and helmets, spears and even breastplates, flung aside by the stampeding foe in his flight.
Bodies lay scattered at intervals, facedown, with the shameful gashes of death delivered upon their fleeing backs.
On the right where the stronger troops of the enemy had held longer against the Skiritai, the carnage spread thicker and more dense, the turf chewed more fiercely; along the battle wall which the foe had erected to anchor its flank, clumps of corpses could be seen, slain as they, trapped by their own wall, had struggled in vain to scale it.
Then the eye found the center, where the slaughter had achieved its most savage concentration.
Here the earth was rent and torn as if a thousand span of oxen had assaulted it all day with the might of their hooves and the steel of their ploughs' deep-churning blades. The chewed-up dirt, dark with piss and blood, extended in a line three hundred meters across and a hundred deep where the feet of the contending formations had heaved and strained for purchase upon the earth.
Bodies sprawled like a carpet upon the earth, mounded in places two and three deep. To the rear, across the plain where the Syrakusans had fled, and along the riven walls of the watercourse, more corpses could be seen in scattered perimeters manned by two and three, five and seven, where these in their flight had closed ranks and made their stand, doomed as castles of sand against the tide. They fell with wounds of honor, facing their Spartan foe, cut down from the front.
A wail arose from the hillsides where the watching An-tirhionian skirmishers now looked down upon their comrades' vanquishment, while from the walls of the citadel itself wives and daughters keened in grief as must have Hekube and Andromache upon the battlements of Ilium.
The Spartans were hauling bodies off the stacks of the dead, seeking friend or brother, wounded and clinging yet to life. As each groaning foeman was flung down, a xiphos blade held him captive at the throat. Hold! Leonidas cried, motioning urgently to the trumpeters to resound the call to break off. Attend them! Attend the enemy too! he shouted, and the officers relayed the order up and down the line.
Alexandras and I, pounding pell-mell down the slope, had reached the plain now. We were on the field. I sprinted two strides behind as the boy ranged in mortal urgency among the blood- and gore-splattered warriors, whose flesh seemed yet to burn with the furnace heat of fury and whose breath appeared to our eyes to steam upon the air.
Father! Alexandros cried in the exigency of dread, and then, ahead, he glimpsed the crosscrested officer's helmet and then Olympieus himself, upright and unwounded. The expression of shock upon the polemarch's face was almost comical when he beheld his son sprinting toward him out of the carnage. Man and boy embraced with wide-flung arms. Alexandras' fingers searched his father's corselet and breastplate, probing to confirm that all four limbs stood intact and no unseen punctures yet leaked dark blood.
Dienekes emerged from the still-seething throng; Alexandros flew into his arms. Are you all right? Did they wound you? I raced up. Suicide stood there beside Dienekes, dam-ing needle javelins in hand, his own face sprayed with the sling of enemy blood. A knot of staring men had clustered; I saw at their feet the torn and motionless form of Meriones, Olympieus' squire.
What are you doing here? Olympieus demanded of his son, his tone turning to anger as he realized the peril the boy had put himself in. How did you get here?
Around us other faces reacted with equal wrath. Olympieus swatted his son, hard, across the skull. Then the boy saw Meriones. With a cry of anguish he dropped to his knees in the dirt beside the fallen squire.
We swam, I announced. A heavy fist cuffed me, then another and another.
What is this to you, a lark? You come to sightsee?
The men were furious, as well they should have been. Alexandros, unhearing in his concern for Meriones, knelt over the man, who lay upon his back with a warrior crouched at each side, his helmetless head pillowed upon a hoplon shield and his bushy white beard clotted with blood, snot and sputum. Meriones, as a squire, had no cuirass to shield his breast; he had taken a Syrakusan eight-footer right through the bone of the chest. A seeping wound pooled blood into the bowl of his sternum; his tunic bunched up sodden with the dark, already clotting fluid; we could hear the hissing of air as his sucking lungs fought for breath and inhaled blood instead.
What was he doing in the line? Alexandras' voice, cracking with grief, demanded of the gathered warriors. He's not supposed to be there!
The boy barked for water. Bearer! he shouted, and shouted again. He tore his own tunic and, doubling the linen, pressed it as a dressing against his fallen friend's air-sucking chest. Why don't you bind him? his youth's voice cried to the encircled, gravely watching men. He's dying!
Can't you see he's dying? He bellowed again for water, but none came. The men knew why, and now, watching, it became clear to Alexandras too, as it was already to Meriones.
I've got one foot in the ferry, little old nephew, the ancient fighter's leaking air pipes managed to croak.
Life was ebbing fast from the warrior's eyes. He was, as I said, not a Spartan but a Potidaean, an officer in his own country, taken captive long years past and never permitted to see his home again. With an effort that was pitiful to behold, Meriones summoned strength to lift one hand, black with blood, and placed it gently upon the boy's. Their parts reversed, the dying man comforted the living youth.
No happier death than this, his leaking lungs wheezed.
You will go home, Alexandras vowed. By all the gods, I will carry your bones myself.
Olympieus knelt now too, taking his squire's hand in his own. Name your wish, old friend. The Spartans will bear you there.
The old man tried to speak but the pipes of his throat would not obey him. He struggled weakly to elevate his head; Alexandras restrained him, then gently cradled the veteran's neck and lifted it. Meriones' eyes glanced to the front and the sides where, amid the churned and liquid turf, the scarlet cloaks of other fallen warriors could be seen, each surrounded by a knot of comrades and brothers-in-arms. Then, with an effort which seemed to consume all his remaining substance, he spoke:
Where these lie, plant me there. Here is my home. I ask none better.
Olympieus swore it. Alexandras, kissing Meriones' forehead, seconded the vow.
A dark peace seemed to settle upon the man's eyes. A moment passed. Then Alexandras lifted his own clear pure tenor in the Hero's Farewell;
That daimon which God breathed into me at birth I with glad heart return now to Him.
In victory Dekton brought to Leonidas the rooster which would be sacrificed as thank-offering to Zeus and Nike. The boy himself was flushed with the triumph; his hands shook violently, wishing they had been permitted to hold a shield and spear and stand in the line of battle.
For my own part I could not stop staring about at the faces of the warriors I had known and watched in drill and training but until now had never looked upon in the blood and horror of battle. Their stature in my mind, already elevated beyond the men of any other city I had known, now rose close to that of heroes and demigods. I had witnessed the mere sight of them utterly rout the not-unvaliant Antirhioni-ans, fighting before their own walls in defense of their homes and families, and overcome within minutes the crack troops of the Syrakusans and their mercenaries, trained and equipped by the tyrant Gelon's limitless gold.
Nowhere in all the field had these Spartans faltered. Now even in the hot blood aftermath their discipline maintained them chaste and noble, above all vaunting and boasting. They did not strip the bodies of the slain, as the soldiers of any other city would eagerly and gloatingly do, nor did they erect trophies of vainglory and conceit from the arms of the vanquished. Their austere thank-offering was a single cock, worth less than an obol, not because they disrespected the gods, but because they held them in awe and deemed it dishonorable to overexpress their mortal joy in this triumph that heaven had granted them.
I watched Dienekes, re-forming the ranks of his platoon, listing their losses and summoning aid for the wounded, the traumatiai. The Spartans have a term for that state of mind which must at all costs be shunned in battle. They call it katalepsis, possession, meaning that derangement of the senses that comes when terror or anger usurps dominion of the mind.
This, I realized now watching Dienekes rally and tend to his men, was the role of the officer: to prevent those under his command, at all stages of battle-before, during and after-from becoming possessed. To fire their valor when it flagged and rein in their fury when it threatened to take them out of hand. That was Dienekes' job. That was why he wore the trans verse-crested helmet of an officer.
His was not, I could see now, the heroism of an Achilles. He was not a superman who waded invulnerably into the slaughter, single-handedly slaying the foe by myriads. He was just a man doing a job. A job whose primary attribute was self-restraint and self-composure, not for his own sake, but for those whom he led by his example. A job whose objective could be boiled down to the single understatement, as he did at the Hot Gates on the morning he died, of performing the commonplace under uncommonplace conditions.
The men were collecting their tickets now. These, to which I alluded earlier, are the woodentwig bracelets tied with twine which each man makes for himself before battle, to identify his corpse if necessary in the aftermath. A man writes or scratches his name twice, once on each end of the twig, then breaks it down the middle. The blood half he ties with string around his left wrist and wears with him into battle; the wine half stays behind in a basket maintained with the tram in the rear. The halves are broken off jaggedly on purpose, so that even if the blood name were effaced or defiled in some other way, its twin would still fit in an unequivocally recognizable manner. When the battle is over, each man retrieves his ticket. Those remaining unclaimed in the basket number and identify the slain.
When the men heard their names called and came forward to take their tickets, they could not stop their limbs from quaking. All up and down the line, one beheld warriors clustering in groups of twos and threes as the terror they had managed to hold at bay throughout the battle now slipped its bonds and surged upon them, overwhelming their hearts. Clasping their comrades by the hand, they knelt, not from reverence alone, though that element was abundant, but because the strength had suddenly fled from their knees, which could no longer support them. Many wept, others shuddered violently. This was not regarded as effeminate, but termed in the Doric idiom hesma phobou, purging or fear-shedding.
Leonidas strode among the men, letting all see that their king lived and moved unwounded. The men gulped greedily their ration of strong, heavy wine and made no shame to drink water as well and plenty of it. The wine went down fast and produced no effect whatever. Some of the men tried to dress their hair, as if thereby to induce a return to normalcy. But their hands trembled so badly they could not do it. Others would chuckle knowingly at the sight, the veteran warriors who knew better than to try; it was impossible to make the limbs behave, and the frustrated groomers would chuckle back, a dark laughter from hell. When the tickets had all found their mates and been reclaimed by their owners, those pieces bereft within the basket identified the men who had been killed or were too badly wounded to come forward. These latter were claimed by brothers and friends, fathers and sons and lovers. Sometimes a man would take his own ticket, then another, and sometimes a third besides, weeping as he accepted them. Many returned to the basket, just to look in. In this way they could perceive the numbers of the lost.
This day it was twenty-eight.
His Majesty may set this number in comparison alongside the thousands slain in greater battles and perhaps judge it insignificant. But it seemed like decimation now.
There was a stir, and Leonidas emerged into view along the front of the assembled warriors.
Have you knelt? He moved down the line, not declaiming like some proud monarch seeking satisfaction from the sound of his own voice, but speaking softly like a comrade, touching each man's elbow, embracing some, placing an arm around others, speaking to each warrior man-toman, Peer-to-Peer, with no kingly condescension. Assemble, the word spread by murmur without needing to be spoken.
Does every man have the halves of his ticket? Have your hands stopped shaking enough to fit them together? He laughed and the men laughed with him. They loved him.
The victors formed up in no particular order, wounded and unwounded, plus squires and helots.
They cleared a space for the king, those in front kneeling to allow their comrades behind to see and hear, while Leonidas himself strode informally up and down the line, presenting himself so that his voice would carry and his face be seen by all.
The battle priest, Olympieus in this case, held the basket up before the king. Leonidas took out each unclaimed ticket and read the name. He offered no eulogy. No word was spoken but the name. Among the Spartans, this alone is considered the purest form of consecration.
Alkamenes. Damon. Antalkides. Lysandros. On down the list.
The bodies, already retrieved by their squires from the field, would be cleansed and oiled; prayers would be offered and sacrifices made. Each of the fallen would be shrouded in his own cloak or that of a friend and interred here upon the site, beside his mates, beneath a mound of honor. Shield, sword, spear and armor alone would be borne home by his comrades, unless the omens declared it more honorable for his corpse to be restored and interred in Lakedaemon.
Leonidas now held up his own bracelet and slid the twin halves together into place. Brothers and allies, I salute you. Gather, friends, and hear the words of my heart.
He paused for a moment, sober and solemn.
Then, when all stood silent, he spoke:
When a man seats before his eyes the bronze face of his helmet and steps off from the line of departure, he divides himself, as he divides his 'ticket,' in two parts. One part he leaves behind.
That part which takes delight in his children, which lifts his voice in the chorus, which clasps his wife to him in the sweet darkness of their bed.
That half of him, the best part, a man sets aside and leaves behind. He banishes from his heart all feelings of tenderness and mercy, all compassion and kindness, all thought or concept of the enemy as a man, a human being like himself. He marches into battle bearing only the second portion of himself, the baser measure, that half which knows slaughter and butchery and turns the blind eye to quarter. He could not fight at all if he did not do this.
The men listened, silent and solemn. Leonidas at that time was fifty-five years old. He had fought in more than two score battles, since he was twenty; wounds as ancient as thirty years stood forth, lurid upon his shoulders and calves, on his neck and across his steel-colored beard.
Then this man returns, alive, out of the slaughter. He hears his name called and comes forward to take his ticket. He reclaims that part of himself which he had earlier set aside.
This is a holy moment. A sacramental moment. A moment in which a man feels the gods as close as his own breath.
What unknowable mercy has spared us this day? What clemency of the divine has turned the enemy's spear one handbreadth from our throat and driven it fatally into the breast of the beloved comrade at our side? Why are we still here above the earth, we who are no better, no braver, who reverenced heaven no more than these our brothers whom the gods have dispatched to hell?
When a man joins the two pieces of his ticket and sees them weld in union together, he feels that part of him, the part that knows love and mercy and compassion, come flooding back over him. This is what unstrings his knees.
What else can a man feel at that moment than the most grave and profound thanksgiving to the gods who, for reasons unknowable, have spared his life this day? Tomorrow their whim may alter. Next week, next year. But this day the sun still shines upon him, he feels its warmth upon his shoulders, he beholds about him the faces of his comrades whom he loves and he rejoices in their deliverance and his own.
Leonidas paused now, in the center of the space left open for him by the troops.
I have ordered pursuit of the foe ceased, I have commanded an end to the slaughter of these whom today we called our enemies. Let them return to their homes. Let them embrace their wives and children. Let them, like us, weep tears of salvation and burn thank-offerings to the gods.
Let no one of us forget or misapprehend the reason we fought other Greeks here today. Not to conquer or enslave them, our brothers, but to make them allies against a greater enemy. By persuasion, we hoped. By coercion, in the event.
But no matter, they are our allies now and we will treat them as such from this moment.
The Persian!
Suddenly Leonidas' voice rose, booming with such explosive emotion that those closest to him started from its sudden power. The Persian is why we fought here today. His presence loomed, invisible, over the battlefield. He is why these tickets lie bereft in this basket. Why twenty-eight of the noblest men of the city will never again behold the beauty of her hills or dance again to her sweet music. I know many of you think I am half-cracked, I and Kleomenes the king before me.
Laughter from the men. I hear the whispers, and sometimes they're not such whispers. More laughter. Leonidas hears voices the rest of us don't. He takes chances with his life in an unkingly manner and prepares for war against an enemy he has never seen and who many say will never come. All this is true…
The men laughed again. But hear this and never forget it: the Persian will come. He will come in numbers dwarfing those he sent four years ago when the Athenians and Platae-ans defeated him so gloriously on the plain of Marathon. He will come tenfold, a hundredfold, mightier. And he will come soon.
Leonidas paused again, the heat in his breast making his face flush and his eyes bum with fever and conviction.
Listen to me, brothers. The Persian is not a king as Kleomenes was to us or as I am to you now.
He does not take his place with shield and spear amid the manslaughter, but looks on, safe, from a distance, atop a hill, upon a golden throne. Murmured jeers rose from the men's throats as Leonidas spoke this. His comrades are not Peers and Equals, free to speak their minds before him without fear, but slaves and chattel. Each man, even the noblest, is deemed not an equal before God, but the King's property, counted no more than a goat or a pig, and driven into battle not by love of nation or liberty, but by the lash of other slaves' whips.
This King has tasted defeat at the Hellenes' hands, and it is bitter to his vanity. He comes now to revenge himself, but he comes not as a man worthy of respect, but as a spoiled and petulant child, in its tantrum when a toy is snatched from it by a playmate. I spit on this King's crown. I wipe my ass on his throne, which is the seat of a slave and which seeks nothing more noble than to make all other men slaves.
Everything I have done as king and everything Kle-omenes has performed before me, every enemy courted, every confederation forged, every weak-kneed ally brought to heel, has been for this single event: the day when Darius, or one of his sons, returns to Hellas to pay us out.
Leonidas lifted now the basket which held the tickets of the fallen.
That is why these, better men than ourselves, gave their lives here today, why they consecrated this earth with their heroes blood. This is the meaning of their sacrifice. They have dumped their guts not in this piss-puddle war we fought today, but in the first of many battles in the greater war which God in heaven and all of you in your hearts know is coming. These brothers are heroes of that war, which will be the gravest and most calamitous in history.
On that day, and Leonidas gestured out over the gulf, to Antirhion below and Rhion across the channel, on that day when the Persian brings his multitudes against us via this strait, he will find not clear passage and paid-for friends, but enemies united and implacable, Hellene allies who will sally to meet him from both shores. And if he chooses some other route, if his spies report what awaits him here and he elects another passage, some other site of battle where land and sea play to our greater advantage, it will be because of what we did today, because of the sacrifice of these our brothers whose bodies we inter now within a hero's grave.
Therefore I have not waited for the Syrakusans and the Antirhionians, our enemies this day, to send their heralds to us as is customary to entreat our permission to retrieve the bodies of their slain. I have dispatched our runners to them first, offering them truce without rancor, with generosity. Let our new allies reclaim unprofaned the armor of their fallen, let them recover undefiled the bodies of their husbands and sons.
Let those we spared this day stand beside us in line of battle on that day when we teach the Persian once and for all what valor free men can bring to bear against slaves, no matter how vast their numbers or how fiercely they are driven on by their child-king's whip.