They wore trousers. Pantaloons of purple, bloused below the knee, top-ping calf-length boots of doeskin or some other precious product of the tannery. Their tunics were sleeved and embroidered, beneath mail jackets of armor shaped like fish scales; their helmets open-faced and brilliantly plumed, of hammered iron shaped like domes. Their cheeks they wore rouged and their ears and throats bedecked with ornament. They looked like women and yet the effect of their raiment, surreal to Hellene eyes, was not that which evoked contempt, but terror- One felt as if he were facing men from the underworld, from some impossible country beyond Oceanus where up was down and night day. Did they know something the Greeks didn't? Were their light skirmisher shields, which seemed almost ludicrously flimsy contrasted to the massive twentypound oak and bronze, shoulder-to-knee aspides of the Hellenes, somehow, in some undivinable way, superior? Their lances were not the stout ash and cornelwood eight-footers of the Greeks but lighter, slender, almost javelin-like weapons. How would they strike with these? Would they hurl them or thrust them underhand? Was this somehow more lethal than the overhand employed by the Greeks? They were Medes, the vanguard division of the troops who would first assault the allies, though none among the defenders knew this for certain at the time. The Greeks could not distinguish among Persians, Medes, Assyrians, Babylonians, Arabians, Phrygians, Karians, Armenians, Cissians, Cappadocians, Paphlagonians, Bactrians nor any of the other five score Asiatic nations save the Ionian Hellenes and Lydi-ans, the Indians and Ethiopians and Egyptians who stood out by their distinctive arms and armor. Common sense and sound generalship dictated that the commanders of the Empire grant to one nation among their forces the honor of drawing first blood. It made further sense, so the Greeks surmised, that when making trial of an enemy for the first time, a prudent general would not commit the flower of his troops-in His Majesty's case his own Ten Thousand, the Persian household guard known as the Immortals-but rather hold these elite in reserve against the unexpected.
In fact this was the selfsame strategy adopted by Leonidas and the allied commanders. These kept the Spartans back, choosing to honor, after much debate and discussion, the warriors of Thespiae. These were granted first position and now, on the morning of the fifth day, stood formed in their ranks, sixty-four shields across, upon the dance floor formed by the Narrows at the apex, the mountain wall on one side, the cliffs dropping to the gulf on the other and the reconstructed Phokian Wall at the rear.
This, the field of slaughter, comprised an obtuse triangle whose greatest depth lay along the southern flank, that which was anchored by the mountain wall. At this end the Thespians were drawn up eighteen deep. At the opposing end, alongside the drop-off to the sea, their shields were staggered to a depth of ten. This force of the men of Thespiae totaled approximately seven hundred.
Immediately to their rear, atop the Wall, stood the Spartans, Phliasians and Mycenaeans, to a total of six hundred. Behind these every other allied contingent was likewise drawn up, all in full panoplia.
Two hours had elapsed since the enemy had first been sighted, half a mile down the track to Trachis, and still no motion had come. The morning was hot. Down the track, the roadway widened into an open area about the size of the agora of a small city. There, just after dawn, the lookouts had espied the Medians assembling. Their numbers were about four thousand. These, however, were only the foe who could be seen; the shoulder of the mountain hid the trail and the marshaling stations beyond.
One could hear the enemy trumpets and the shouted orders of their officers moving more and more men into position beyond the shoulder. How many more thousands massed there out of sight?
The quarter hours crawled by. The Medes continued marshaling, but did not advance. The Hellenic lookouts began shouting insults down at them. Back in the Narrows, the heat and other exigencies had begun to work on the chafing, impatient Greeks. It made no sense to sweat longer under the burdens of full armor. Dump 'em but be ready to hump 'em! Dithyrambos, the Thespian captain, called out to his coun-trymen in the coarse slang of his city. Squires and servants dashed forward among the ranks, each assisting his man in disencumbering himself of breastplate and helmet. Corselets were loosened. Shields rested already against knees. The felt undercaps which the men wore beneath their helmets came off and were wrung like bath linens, saturated with sweat. Spears were plunged at the position of rest, butt-spike-first, into the hard dirt, where they stood now in their numbers like an iron-tipped forest. The troops were permitted to kneel. Squires with skins of water circulated, replenishing the parched warriors. It was a safe bet that many skins contained refreshment more potent than that scooped from a spring. As the delay grew longer, the sense of unreality heightened. Was this another false alarm, like the previous four days? Would the Persian attack at all?
Snap out of those daydreams! an officer barked.
The troops, bleary-eyed and sun-scorched, continued eyeing Leonidas on the Wall with the commanders. What were they talking about? Would the order come to stand down?
Even Dienekes grew impatient. Why is it in war you can't fall asleep when you want to and can't stay awake when you have to? He was just stepping forward to address a steadying word to his platoon when from out front among the foreranks rose a shout of such intensity that it cut his words off in midbreath. Every eye swung skyward.
The Greeks now saw what had caused the delay.
There, several hundred feet above and one ridgeline removed, a party of Persian servants escorted by a company of their Immortals was erecting a platform and a throne.
Mother of bitches. Dienekes grinned. It's young Purple Balls himself.
High above the armies, a man of between thirty and forty years could be descried plainly, in robes of purple fringed with gold, mounting the platform and assuming his station upon the throne. The distance was perhaps eight hundred feet, up and back, but even at that range it was impossible to mistake the Persian monarch's surpassing handsomeness and nobility of stature.
Nor could the supreme self-assurance of his carriage be misread even at this distance. He looked like a man come to watch an entertainment. A pleasantly diverting show, one whose outcome was foreordained and yet which promised a certain level of amusement. He took his seat. A sunshade was adjusted by his servants. We could see a table of refreshments placed at his side and, upon his left, several writing desks set into place, each manned by a secretary.
Obscene gestures and shouted insults rose from four thousand Greek throats.
His Majesty rose with aplomb in response to the jeers. He gestured elegantly and, it seemed, with humor, as if acknowledging the adulation of his subjects. He bowed with a flourish. It seemed, though the distance was too great to be sure, as if he were smiling. He saluted his own captains and settled regally upon his throne.
My place was on the Wall, thirty stations in from the left flank anchored by the mountain. I could see, as could all the Thespians before the Wall and every Lakedaemonian, Mycenaean and Phliasian atop it, the captains of the enemy, advancing now to the sound of their trumpets, in the van before the massed ranks of their infantry. My God, they looked handsome. Six division commanders, each, it seemed, taller and nobler than the next. We learned later that these were not merely the flower of the Median aristocracy, but that their ranks were reinforced by the sons and brothers of those who had been slain ten years earlier by the Greeks at Marathon. But what froze the blood was their demeanor. Their carriage shone forth, bold to the point of contemptuous. They would brush the defenders aside, that's what they thought. The meat of their lunch was already roasting, back down in camp. They would polish us off without raising a sweat, then return to dine at their leisure.
I glanced to Alexandras; his brow glistened, pale as a winding sheet; his wind came in strangled, wheezing gasps. My master stood at his shoulder, one pace to the fore. Dienekes' attention held riveted to the Medes, whose massed ranks now filled the Narrows and seemed to extend endlessly beyond, out of sight along the track. But no emotion disclari-fied his reason. He was gauging them strategically, coolly assessing their armament and the bearing of their officers, the dress and interval of their ranks. They were mortal men like us; was their vision struck, like ours, with awe of the force which stood now opposed to them? Leonidas had stressed again and again to the officers of the Thespians that their men's shields, greaves and helmets must be bossed to the most brilliant sheen possible. These now shone like mirrors. Above the rims of the bronzefaced aspides, each helmet blazed magnificently, overtopped with a lofty horsehair crest, which as it trembled and quavered in the breeze not only created the impression of daunting height and stature but lent an aspect of dread which cannot be communicated in words but must be beheld to be understood.
Adding further to the theater of terror presented by the Hellenic phalanx and, to my mind most frightful of all, were the blank, expressionless facings of the Greek helmets, with their bronze nasals thick as a man's thumb, their flaring cheekpieces and the unholy hollows of their eye slits, covering the entire face and projecting to the enemy the sensation that he was facing not creatures of flesh like himself, but some ghastly invulnerable machine, pitiless and unquenchable. I had laughed with Alexandros not two hours earlier as he seated the helmet over his felt undercap; how sweet and boyish he appeared in one instant, with the helmet cocked harmlessly back upon his brow and the youthful, almost feminine features of his face exposed.
Then with one undramatic motion, his right hand clasped the flare of the cheekpiece and tugged the ghastly mask down; in an instant the humanity of his face vanished, his gentle expressive eyes became unseeable pools of blackness chasmed within the fierce eye sockets of bronze; all compassion fled in an instant from his aspect, replaced with the blank mask of murder. Push it back, I cried. You're scaring the hell out of me. It was no joke.
This now Dienekes was assessing, the effect of Hellenic armor upon the enemy. My master's eyes scanned the foe's ranks; you could see piss stains darkening the trouser fronts of more than one man. Spear tips shivered here and there. Now the Medes formed up. Each rank found its mark, each commander his station.
More endless moments passed. Tedium stood displaced by terror. Now the nerves began to scream; the blood pounded within the recesses of the ears. The hands went numb; all sensation fled the limbs. One's body seemed to treble in weight, all of it cold as stone. One heard one's own voice calling upon the gods and could not tell if the sound was in his head or if he was shamefully crying aloud.
His Majesty's vantage may have been too elevated upon the overstanding mountain to descry what happened next, what stroke of heaven immediately precipitated the clash. It was this. Of a sudden a hare started from the cliffside, dashing out directly between the two armies, no more than thirty feet from the Thespian commander, Xenocratides, who stood foremost in advance of his troops, flanked by his captains, Dithyrambos and Protokreon, all of them garlanded, with their helmets tucked under their arms. At the sight of this wildly sprinting prey, the roan bitch Styx, who had been already barking furiously, loose at the right flank of the Greek formation, now bolted like a shot into the open. The effect would have been comical had not every Hellene's eye seized upon the event at once as a sign from heaven and attended breathlessly upon its outcome.
The hymn to Artemis, which the troops were singing, faltered in midbreath. The hare fled straight for the Median front-rankers, with Styx hot on its heels and mad with pursuit. Both beasts appeared as screaming blurs, the puffs of dust from their churning feet hanging motionless in the air while their bodies, stretched to the full in the race, streaked on before them. The hare sped straight toward the mass of the Medians, at the approach to which it panicked and tore into a tumble, end over end, as it attempted a right-angle turn at top speed. In a flash Styx was on it; the hound's jaws seemed to snap the prey in two, but, to the astonishment of all, the hare burst free, unscathed, and in an eyeblink had regained full velocity in flight.
A zigzag chase ensued, in duration fewer than a dozen heartbeats, in which hare and hound traversed thrice the oudenos chorion, the no-man's-land, between the armies. A hare will always flee uphill; its forelegs are shorter than its rear. The speedster sprung now for the mountain wall, attempting to scamper to salvation. But the face was too sheer; the fugitive's feet skidded out from under; it tumbled, fell back. In an instant its form hung limp and broken within the Stygian jaws.
A cheer rose from the throats of four thousand Greeks, certain that this was an omen of victory, the answer to the hymn it had so serendipitously interrupted. But now from the ranks of the Medes stepped forth two archers. As Styx turned, seeking his master to show off the prize, a pair of cane arrows, launched from no farther than twenty yards and striking simultaneously, slammed into the beast's flank and throat, tumbling him head over heels into the dust.
A cry of anguish erupted from the Skirite whom all had come to call Hound. For agonizing moments his dog flopped and writhed, pinioned mortally by the enemy's shafts. We heard the enemy commander cry an order in his tongue. At once a thousand Median archers elevated their bows. Here it comes! someone cried from the Wall. Every Hellene's shield was snatched at once to high port. That sound which is not a sound but a silence, a rip like that of fabric torn in the wind, now keened from the fisted grips of the enemy's massed bowmen as their string hands released and their triple-pointed bronzeheads sprung as one into the air, shafts singing, driving them forward.
While these missiles arced yet through the aether, the Thespian commander, Xenocratides, seized the instant. Zeus Thunderer and Victory! he cried, tearing the garland from his brow and jerking his helmet down into position of combat, covering, save the eye slits, his entire face. In an instant every man of the Hellenes followed suit. A thousand arrows rained on them in homicidal deluge. The Alpine bellowed. Thespiae!
From where I stood atop the Wall, it seemed as if the Thespians closed to the foe within the space of two heartbeats. Their front ranks hit the Medes not with that sound of thunder, bronze upon bronze, which the Hellenes knew from collisions with their own kind, but with a less dramatic, almost sickening crunch, like ten thousand fistfuls of kindling stalks snapped in the vineyardman's fists, as the metallic facings of the Greeks' shields collided with the wall of wicker thrown up by the Medes. The enemy reeled and staggered. The Thespians' spears rose and plunged. In an instant the killing zone was obscured within a maelstrom of churning dust.
The Spartans atop the wall held motionless as that peculiar bellowslike compression of ranks unfolded before their sight; the first three ranks of the Thespians compacted against the foe and churned like a movable wall upon them; now the succeeding ranks, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and more, between whom an interval had opened in the rush, caught up, wave succeeding wave and compressing one upon the other, as each man elevated his shield to high port and planted it as squarely as his terror-unstrung limbs would permit into the back of the comrade before him, seating his left shoulder beneath the upper rim, and, digging his soles and toes into the earth for purchase, hurled himself with all his force into the melee. The heart stopped with the awe of it, as each warrior of the Thespians cried out to his gods, to the souls of his children, to his mother, to every entity, noble or absurd, which he could imagine of aid, and, forgetting his own life, waded with impossible courage into the mob of murder.
What had been a moment earlier a formation of troops, discernible as ranks and files, even as individuals, transformed in the space of a heartbeat into a roiling mass of manslaughter. The Thespian reserves could not contain themselves; they, too, hurled themselves forward, pressing the weight of their ranks into the backs of their brothers, heaving against the compacted mass of the enemy.
Behind these the Thespians' squires danced like ants on a skillet, unranked and unarmored, some backpedaling in terror, others dashing forward, crying out to each other to remember their courage and not fail the men they served. Toward these servants of the train now sailed a second and third rainbow of arrows, loosed by the massed enemy archers stationed to the rear of their lancers and fired in arching fusillades directly over their comrades' plumed heads. The bronzeheads struck the earth in a ragged but discernible front, like a squall line at sea. One could see this curtain of death withdraw rearward as the Median archers fell back behind their lancers, maintaining an interval so they could concentrate their fire upon the mass of the Greeks assaulting them and not squander it, lobbing shafts over their heads. One Thespian squire dashed recklessly forward to the squall line. A bronzehead nailed him right through the foot. He cavorted off, howling in pain and cursing himself for an idiot.
Forward to Lion Stone!
With a cry, Leonidas dismounted his post atop the Wall and advanced down the stone slope, which had been erected deliberately with a descendible incline, into the open before the Spartans, Mycenaeans and Phliasians. These now followed, as the beaten zone of the enemy's bronzeheads retreated under the furious push of the Thespians, maintaining the dress of their lines, as they had rehearsed half a hundred times in the preceding four days, forming up in ready position on the level ground before the Wall.
Along the mountain face to the left, three stones, each at twice the height of a man so they could be seen above the dust of battle, had been selected as benchmarks.
Lizard Stone, so named for a particularly fearless fellow of that species who took his sun thereupon, stood farthest forward of the Phokian Wall, closest to the Narrows, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet from the actual mouth of the pass. This was the line to which the enemy would be permitted to advance. It had been determined by trial with our own men that a thousand of the foe, densely packed, could fit between this demarcation and the Narrows. A thousand, Leonidas had ordered, will be invited to the dance. There, at Lizard Stone, they will be engaged and their advance checked.
Crown Stone, second of the three and another hundred feet rearward of Lizard, defined the line at which each relief detachment would marshal, immediately before being hurled into the fray.
Lion Stone, rearmost of the three and directly in front of the Wall, marked the waiting line-the runners' chute, at which each relief unit would marshal, leaving enough space between itself and those actually fighting for the rear ranks of the combatants to maneuver, to give ground if necessary, to rally, for one flank to support another and for the wounded to be withdrawn. Along this demarcation the Spartans, Mycenaeans and Phliasians now took their stations. Dress the line! the polemarch Olympieus bellowed. Close up your interval! He prowled before the front, disdaining the drizzle of arrows, shouting to his platoon commanders, who relayed the orders to their men.
Leonidas, out farther still before Olympieus, surveyed the roiling, dust-choked struggle ahead at the Narrows. The sound, if anything, had increased. The clash of sword and spear upon shield, the ringing bell-like toll of the bowl-shaped bronze, the cries of the men, the sharp cracking explosions as lances shivered under impact and snapped in two; all echoed and reverberated between the mountain face and the Narrows like some theatron of death circumvallated within its own stone amphitheater. Leonidas, still garlanded, with his helmet up, turned and signaled to the polemarch. Shields to rest! Olympieus' voice boomed. Along the Spartan line, aspides were lowered and set upright upon the earth, top rims balanced against each man's thigh, with the shield's forearm sheath and gripcord ready to hand. All helmets were up, each man's face still exposed. Beside Dienekes, his captain-of-eight, Bias, was hopping like a flea. This is it, this is it, this is it.
Steady, gentlemen. Dienekes stepped forward to let his men see him. Rest those cheeseplates. In the third rank Ariston, beside himself with agitation, yet clutched his shield at port. Dienekes reached through and whacked him with the flat of his lizard-sticker. Are you showing off? The youth snapped to, blinking like a boy awoken from a nightmare. For a full heartbeat you could see he had no idea who Dienekes was or what he wanted. Then, with a start and a sheepish expression, he recovered himself and lowered his shield to position of rest against his knee.
Dienekes prowled before the men. All eyes on me! Here, brothers! His voice penetrated, hard and throaty, carrying with the hoarse bark all combatants know when their tongue turns to leather. Look at me, don't look at the fighting!
The men tore their eyes from the flood and ebb of murder which was taking place a stone's lob in front of them. Dienekes stood before them, his back to the enemy. This is what's happening, a blind man could tell just from the sound. Dienekes' voice carried despite the din from the Narrows. The enemy's shields are too small and too light. They can't protect themselves. The Thespians are carving them up. The men's glances kept tearing away toward the struggle. Look at me! Put your lamps here, goddamn you! The enemy hasn't broken yet. They feel their King's eyes upon them. They're falling like wheat but their courage hasn't failed. I said, look at me! In the killing zone, you see our allies' helmets now, rising out of the slaughter; it seems as if the Thespians are mounting a wall. They are. A wall of Persian bodies.
This was true. Distinctly could be beheld a rise of men, a wave of its own within the boiling melee. The Thespians will only last a few more minutes. They're exhausted from killing. It's a grouse shoot. Fish in a net. Listen to me! When our turn comes, the enemy will be ready to cave.
I can hear him cracking now. Remember: we're going in for a boxer's round. In and out. Nobody dies. No heroes. Get in, kill all you can, then get out when the trumpets sound.
Behind the Spartans, on the Wall, which had been filled with the third wave of Tegeates and Opountian Lokrians twelve hundred strong, the wail of the Alpine cut the din. Out front, Leonidas raised his spear and tugged his helmet down. You could see Polynikes and the Knights advance to envelop him. The Thespians' round was over. Hats down! Dienekes bellowed. Cheeseplates up!
The Spartans came in frontally, eight deep, at a double interval, allowing the Thespian rearmen to withdraw between their files, man by man, one rank at a time. There was no order to it; the Thespians just dropped from exhaustion; the Lakedaemonian tread rolled over them. When the Spartan promachoi, the forerankers, got within three shields of the front, their spears began plunging at the foe over the allies' shoulders. Many of the Thespians just dropped and let themselves be trampled; their mates pulled them to their feet once the line had passed over them.
Everything Dienekes had said proved true. The Medes' shields were not only too light and too small, but their lack of mass prevented them from gaining purchase against the Hellenes' wide and weighty, bowl-shaped aspides. The enemy's targeteer shields slid off the convex fronts of the Greeks', deflecting up and down, left and right, exposing their bearers' necks and thighs, throats and groins. The Spartans struck overhand with their spears, again and again into the faces and gorges of the enemy. The Medes' armament was that of skirmishers, of lightly armed warriors of the plains, whose role was to strike swiftly, from beyond range of spear thrust, dealing death at a distance. This dense-packed phalanx warfare was hell on them.
And yet they stood. Their valor was breathtaking, beyond reckless to the point of madness. It became sacrifice, pure and simple; the Medes gave up their bodies as if flesh itself were a weapon. In minutes the Spartans, and no doubt the Mycenaeans and Phliasians as well, though I couldn't see them, were beyond exhaustion. Simply from killing. Simply from the arm's thrust of the spear, the shoulder's heave of the shield, the thunder of blood through the veins and the hammering of the heart within the breast. The earth grew, not Uttered with enemy bodies, but piled with them. Stacked with them. Mounded with them.
At the heels of the Spartans, their squires abandoned all thought of inflicting casualties with their own missile weapons, turning to nothing but dragging out trampled corpses of the foe to help their men maintain footing. I saw Demades, Ariston's squire, slit three wounded Medes' throats in fifteen seconds, slinging their carcasses back onto a mound already writhing with groaning men.
Discipline had broken among the Median forerankers; officers' bawled orders could not be heard amid the din, and even if they could, the men were so overwhelmed in the crush they could not respond to them. Still the rank and file had not panicked. In desperation they cast aside bows, lances and shields and simply grappled with bare hands onto the weapons of the Spartans. They clutched at spears, hanging on with both hands and struggling to wrest them from the Spartans' grips. Others of the foe flung themselves bodily onto the Lakedaemonians' shields, clasping the top rim and pulling the bowls of the aspides down, scratching and clawing at the Spartans with fingers and fingernails.
Now the slaughter in the forefront became man-to-man, with only the wildest semblance of rank and formation. The Spartans slew belly-to-belly with the murderously efficient thrust-and-draw of their short xiphos swords. I saw Alexandras, his shield torn from his grip, plunging his xiphos into the face of a Mede whose hands clawed and pounded at Alexandras' groin.
The middle-rankers of the Lakedaemonians surged into this bedlam, spears and shields still intact. But the Medes' capacity for reinforcement seemed limitless; above the fray, one could glimpse the next thousand reinforcements thundering into the Narrows like a flood, with more myriads behind, and yet more after that. Despite the catastrophic magnitude of their casualties, the tide began to flow in the enemy's favor. The weight of their masses alone began to buckle the Spartan line. The only thing that stopped the foe from swamping the Hellenes outright was that they couldn't get enough men through the Narrows quickly enough; that, and the wall of Median bodies that now obstructed the confines like a landslide.
The Spartans fought from behind this wall of flesh as if it were a battlement of stone. The enemy swarmed atop it. Now we in the rear could see them; they became targets. Twice Suicide drilled javelins right over Alexandras' shoulder into Medes lunging at the youth from atop the mound of corpses. Bodies were underfoot everywhere. I mounted atop what I thought was a stone, only to feel it writhe and wriggle beneath me. It was a Mede, alive. He plunged the stub end of a shattered machaera scimitar three inches into my calf; I bellowed in terror and toppled into the tangle of other gore-splattered limbs. The foe came at me with his teeth. He seized my arm as if to tear it from its socket; I punched him in the face with my bow still in my grip. Suddenly a foot planted itself massively upon my back. A battle-axe fell with a grisly swoosh; the enemy's skull split like a melon. What are you looking for down there? a voice bellowed. It was Akanthus, Polynikes' squire, spray-blasted with blood and grinning like a madman.
The enemy flooded over the wall of bodies. By the time I got to my feet I had lost sight of Dienekes; I couldn't tell which platoon was which or where my proper station was. I had no idea how long we had been in the fight. Was it two minutes or twenty? I had two spears, spares, lashed to my back, their iron sheathed in leather so that, should I tumble accidentally, the spearpoints would work no harm to our comrades. Every other squire bore the same burden; they were all as scrambled as I was.
Up front you could hear the Median lancers' shafts snapping as they clashed and shivered against the Spartan bronze.
The Spartans' eight-footers made a different sound than the shorter, lighter lances of the foe. The flood was working against the Lakedaemonians, not from want of valor, but simply in consequence of the overwhelming masses of men which the enemy flung into the teeth of the line. I was frantic to locate Dienekes and deliver my spares. The scene was chaos. I could hear breakdowns right and left and see the rear-rankers of the Spartans buckling as the files before them gave way beneath the weight of the Median onslaught. I had to forget my master and serve where I could.
I dashed to a point where the line was thinnest, only three deep and beginning to swell into the desperate inverse bulge that precedes an out-and-out break. A Spartan fell backward amid the maw of slaughter; I saw a Mede lop the warrior's head clean off with a thunderous slash of a scimitar. The skull toppled, helmet and all, severed from its torso and rolling in the dust, with the marrow gushing and the bone of the spine showing grayish white and ghastly. Helmet and head vanished amid a storm of churning greaves and shod and unshod feet. The murderer loosed a cry of triumph, raising his blade to heaven; half an instant later a crimson-clad warrior buried an eight-footer so deep in the foeman's guts that its killing steel burst free, clear out the man's back.
I saw another Mede pass out in terror. The Spartan couldn't haul the weapon back out, so he broke it right off, planting his foot on the still-living enemy's belly and snapping the ash shaft in two. I had no idea who this hero was, and never did find out.
Spear! I heard him bellow, the hellish eye sockets of his helmet spinning to the rear for relief, for a spare, for anything to call to hand. I tore both eight-footers off my back and thrust them into the unknown warrior's hands. Backward. He seized one and whirled, planting it with both hands into another Mede's throat, butt-spike-first. His shield's gripcord had been severed or snapped from within; the aspis itself had fallen to the dirt. There was no room to retrieve it.
Two Medes lunged toward the Spartan with lances leveled, only to be intercepted by the massive bowl of his rankmate's shield, dropping into place to defend him. Both enemy lances snapped as their heads drove against the bronze facing and oak bowlwork of the shield. In the rush, their momentum carried them forward, sprawling onto the ground atop and tangled with the first Spartan. He drove his xiphos into the first Mede's belly, rose with a cry of homicide and slashed the second hilt-deep across both eyes. The enemy clutched his face in horror, blood gushing between the fingers of his clenched and clawing hands. The Spartan seized with both hands his own fallen shield and brought its rim down like an onion chopper, with such force upon the enemy's throat that it nearly decapitated him.
Re-form! Re-form! I heard an officer shouting. Someone shoved me aside from behind. In an instant other Spartans, from another platoon, surged forward, reinforcing the membrane-thin front which teetered at the brink of buckling. This was fighting scrambled. It stopped the heart to behold the gallantry of it. In moments, what had been a situation at the brink of catastrophe was transformed by the discipline and order of the reinforcing ranks into a strong-point, a fulcrum of vantage. Each man who found himself in the fore, no matter what rank he had held in formation, now assumed the role of officer. These closed ranks and lapped shields, shadow-toshadow. A wall of bronze rose before the scrambled mass, buying precious instants for those who found themselves in the rear to re-form and remarshal, surging into position in second, third, fourth ranks, and take on that station's role and rally to it.
Nothing fires the warrior's heart more with courage than to find himself and his comrades at the point of annihilation, at the brink of being routed and overrun, and then to dredge not merely from one's own bowels or guts but from one's own discipline and training the presence of mind not to panic, not to yield to the possession of despair, but instead to complete those homely acts of order which Dienekes had ever declared the supreme accomplishment of the warrior: to perform the commonplace under far-from-commonplace conditions. Not only to achieve this for oneself alone, as Achilles or the solo champions of yore, but to do it as part of a unit, to feel about oneself one's brothers-in-arms, in an instance like this of chaos and disorder, comrades whom one doesn't even know, with whom one has never trained; to feel them filling the spaces alongside him, from spear side and shield side, fore and rear, to behold one's comrades likewise rallying, not in a frenzy of mad possession-driven abandon, but with order and self-composure, each man knowing his role and rising to it, drawing strength from him as he draws it from them; the warrior in these moments finds himself lifted as if by the hand of a god. He cannot tell where his being leaves off and that of the comrade beside him begins. In that moment the phalanx forms a unity so dense and all-divining that it performs not merely at the level of a machine or engine of war but, surpassing that, to the state of a single organism, a beast of one blood and heart.
The foemen's arrows rained upon the Spartan line. From where I found myself, just behind the rear-rankers, I could see the warriors' feet, at first churning in disarray for purchase on the blood and gore-beslimed earth, now settle into a unison, a grinding relentless cadence. The pipers' wail pierced the din of bronze and fury, sounding the beat which was part music and part pulse of the heart. With a heave, the warriors' shield-side foot pressed forward, bows-on to the enemy; now the spear-side foot, planted at a ninety-degree angle, dug into the mud; the arch sank as every stone of the man's weight found purchase upon the insole, and, with left shoulder planted into the inner bowl of the shield whose broad outer surface was pressed into the back of the comrade before him, he summoned all force of tissue and tendon to surge and heave upon the beat. Like ranked oarsmen straining upon the shaft of a single oar, the unified push of the men's exertions propelled the ship of the phalanx forward into the tide of the enemy. Up front the eight-footers of the Spartans thrust downward upon the foe, driven by each man's spear arm in an overhand strike, across the upper rim of his shield, toward the enemy's face, throat and shoulders. The sound of shield against shield was no longer the clash and clang of initial impact, but deeper and more terrifying, a grinding metallic mechanism like the jaws of some unholy mill of murder. Nor did the men's cries, Spartans and Medes, rise any longer in the mad chorus of rage and terror.
Instead each warrior's lungs pumped only for breath; chests heaved like foundry bellows, sweat coursed onto the ground in runnels, while the sound which arose from the throats of the contending masses was like nothing so much as a myriad quarrymen, each harnessed to the twined rope of the sled, groaning and straining to drag some massive stone across the resisting earth.
War is work, Dienekes had always taught, seeking to strip it of its mystery. The Medes, for all their valor, all their numbers and all the skill they doubtless possessed in the type of open-plain warfare with which they had conquered all Asia, had not served their apprenticeship in this, Hellene-style heavy-infantry combat. Their files had not trained to hold line of thrust and gather themselves to heave in unison; the ranks had not drilled endlessly as the Spartans had in maintaining dress and interval, cover and shadow. Amid the manslaughter the Medes became a mob. They shoved at the Lakedaemonians like sheep fleeing a fire in a shearing pen, without cadence or cohesion, fueled only by courage, which, glorious though it was, could not prevail against the disciplined and cohesive assault which now pressed upon them.
The luckless foemen in front had nowhere to hide. They found themselves pinned between the mob of their own fellows trampling them from behind and the Spartan spears plunging upon them from the fore. Men expired simply from want of breath. Their hearts gave out under the extremity. I glimpsed Alpheus and Maron; like a pair of yoked oxen the brothers, fighting shoulder-to-shoulder, formed the tempered steel point of a twelve-deep thrust that drove into and split the Median ranks a hundred feet out from the mountain wall.
The Knights, to the twins' right, drove into this breach with Leonidas fighting in the van; they turned the enemy line into a flank and pressed furiously upon the foemen's unshielded right. God help the sons of the Empire seeking to stand against these, Polynikes and Doreion, Terkleius and Patrokles, Nikolaus and the two Agises, all matchless athletes in the prime of young manhood, fighting alongside their king and mad to seize the glory that now quavered within their grasp.
For myself, I confess the horror of it nearly overcame me. Though I had loaded up double with two packed quivers, twenty-four ironheads, the demands of fire had come so fierce and furious that I was down to nothing before I could spit. I was firing between the helmets of the warriors, point-blank into the faces and throats of the foe. This was not archery, it was slaughter. I was pulling ironheads from the bowels of still-living men to reload and replenish my spent stock. The ash of a shaft drawn across my bow hand slipped from its notch, slimy with gore and tissue; warheads dripped blood before they were even fired. Overwhelmed by horror, my eyes clamped shut of their own will; I had to tear at my face with both hands to drive them open. Had I gone mad?
I was desperate to find Dienekes, to get to my station covering him, but the part of my mind which still owned its wits ordered me to rally myself here, contribute here.
In the crush of the phalanx each man could sense the sea change as the rush of emergency passed like a wave, replaced by the steadying, settling sensation of fear passing over, composure returning and the drill settling to the murderous work of war. Who can say by what unspoken timbre the tidal flow of the fight is communicated within the massed ranks? Some-how the warriors sensed that the Spartan left, along the mountain face, had broken the Medes. A cheer swept laterally like a storm front, rising and multiplying from the throats of the Lakedaemonians.
The enemy knew it too. They could feel their line caving in. Now at last I found my master.
With a cry of joy I spotted his cross-crested officer's helmet, in the fore, pressing murderously upon a knot of Median lancers who no longer offered attack but only stumbled rearward in terror, casting away their shields as they fouled upon the desperate press of men behind them. I sprinted toward his position, across the open space immediately to the rear of the grinding, gnashing, advancing Spartan line. This strip of hinter ground comprised the only corridor of haven upon the entire field, in the overshot gap between the hand-to-hand slaughter of the line and the beaten zone of the Median archers' arrows, which they flung from the rear of their own lines over the clashing armies toward the Hellenic formations waiting in reserve.
The Median wounded had dragged themselves into this pocket of sanctuary, they and the terrorstricken, the possum players and the exhausted. Enemy bodies were everywhere, the dead and the dying, the trampled and the overrun, the maimed and the massacred. I saw a Mede with a magnificent beard sitting sheepishly upon the ground, cradling his intestines in his hands. As I dashed past, one of his own kinsmen's arrows rained from above, nailing his thigh to the turf. His eyes met mine with the most piteous expression; I don't know why, but I dragged him a halfdozen strides, into the mainland of the pocket of illusory safety. I looked behind. The Tegeates and the Opountian Lokrians, our allies next up into the fray, knelt in their ranks, massed along the line below Lion Stone with their shields interleaved and elevated to deflect the deluge of enemy shafts. The expanse of earth before them bristled like a pincushion, as dense with enemy arrows as the quills of a hedgehog's spine. The palisade of the Wall was afire, blazing with the tow bolts of the enemy by the hundred.
Now the Median lancers cracked. Like a child's game of bowls, their stacked files toppled rearward; bodies fell and tumbled upon one another as those in the fore attempted to flee and those in the rear became entangled pell-mell with their flight. The ground before the Spartan advance became a sea of limbs and torsos, trousered thighs and bellies, the backs of men crawling hand over hand across their fallen comrades, while others, pinned upon their backs, writhed and cried out in their tongue, hands upraised, pleading for quarter.
The slaughter surpassed the mind's capacity to assimilate it. I saw Olympieus thrashing rearward, treading not upon ground, but upon the flesh of the fallen foe, across a carpet of bodies, the wounded as well as the dead, while his squire, Abattus, flanked him, sinking his lizard-sticker, punching the spiked shaft downward like a boatman poling a punt, into the bellies of the yetunslain enemy as they passed. Olympieus advanced into plain view of the allied reserves in position along the Wall. He stripped his helmet so the commanders could see his face, then pumped thrice with his horizontally held spear. Advance! Advance!
With a cry that curdled the blood, they did.
I saw Olympieus pause bareheaded and stare at the foe-strewn earth about him, himself overcome by the scale of the carnage. Then he reseated his helmet; his face vanished beneath the bloodWasted bronze and, summoning his squire, he strode back to the slaughter.
To the rear of the routed lancers stood their brothers, the Median archers. These were drawn up in still-ordered ranks, twenty deep, each bowman in station behind a body-height shield of wicker, its base anchored to the earth with spikes of iron. A no-man's-land of a hundred feet separated the Spartans from this wall of bowmen. The foe now began firing directly into their own lancers, the last pockets of the valiant who yet grappled with the Lakedaemonian advance.
The Medes were shooting their own men in the back.
They didn't care if they slew ten of their brothers, if one lucky bolt could nail a Spartan.
Of all the moments of supreme valor which unfolded throughout this long grisly day, that which the allies upon the Wall now beheld surpassed all, nor could any who witnessed it place any sight beneath heaven alongside it as equal. As the Spartan front routed the last remaining lancers, its forerankers emerged into the open, exposed to what was now the nearly point-blank fire of the Median archers. Leoni-das himself, at his age having survived a melee of murder whose physical expenditure alone would have pressed beyond the limits of endurance even the stoutest youth in his prime, yet summoned the steel to stride to the fore, shouting the order to form up and advance. This command the Lake-daemonians obeyed, if not with the precision of the parade ground, then with a discipline and order beyond imagining under the circumstances. Before the Medes had time to loose their second broadside, they found themselves face-to-face with a front of sixty-plus shields, the lambdas of Lakedaemon obscured beneath horrific layers of mud, gore and blood which ran in rivers down the bronze and dripped from the leather aprons pended beneath the aspides, the oxhide skirts which protected the warriors' legs from precisely the fusillade into which they now advanced. Heavy bronze greaves defended the calves; above each shield rim extended only the armored crowns of the helmets, eye slits alone exposed, while overtopping these waved the front-to-back horsehair plumes of the warriors and the transverse crests of the officers.
The wall of bronze and crimson advanced into the Median fire. Cane arrows ripped with murderous velocity into the Spartan lines. Possessed by terror, an archer will always shoot high; you could hear these overshot shafts hailing and clattering as they ripped at crown height past the Spartan foreranks and tore into the forest of spears held at the vertical; then the missiles tumbled, spent, among the armored ranks. Bronzehead bolts caromed off bronze-faced shields with a sound like a hammer on an anvil, their furious drumming punctuated by the concussive thwock of a dead-on shot penetrating metal and oak so the head lanced through the shield like a nail piercing a board.
I myself had planted shoulder and spine into the back of Medon, senior of the Deukalion mess, whose station of honor stood rearmost of the first file in Dienekes' platoon. The pipers were hunkered immediately in the lee of the formation, unarmed and unarmored, crouching for cover as close to the heels of the rear-rankers as they could without tripping them, all the while summoning breath to skirl out the shrill aulos's beat. The densely packed ranks advanced not in a mobbed disordered charge shouting like savages, but dead silent, sober, almost stately, with a dread deliberateness in time to the pipers' keening wail. Between the fighting fronts, the hundredfoot gap had narrowed to sixty. Now the Medes' fire redoubled. You could hear the orders bawled by their officers and feel the air itself vibrate as the ranks of the foe loosed their fusillades in ever more furious succession.
A single arrow blazing past one's ear can turn the knees to jelly; the honed warhead seems to scream with malevolence, the hurdling weight of the shaft driving its death-dealing cargo; then come the fletched feathers communicating by their silent shriek the homicidal intent of the enemy. A hundred arrows make a different sound. Now the air seems to thicken, to become dense, incandescent; it vibrates like a solid. The warrior feels encapsulated as in a corridor of living steel; reality shrinks to the zone of murder in which he finds himself imprisoned; the sky itself cannot be glimpsed nor even remembered.
Now come a thousand arrows. The sound is like a wall. There is no space within, no interval of haven. Solid as a mountain, impenetrable; it sings with death. And when those arrows are launched not skyward in long-range arcing trajectory to beat upon the target driven by the weight of their own fall, but instead are fired point-blank, dead flush from the chute of the bowman's grip, so that their flight is level, flat, loosed at such velocity and at such close range that the archer does not trouble even to calculate drop into his targeting equation; this is the rain of iron, hellfire at its purest.
Into this the Spartans advanced. They were told later by the allies observing from the Wall that at this instant, as the spears of the Spartans' front ranks lowered in unison from the vertical plane of advance into the leveled position of attack and the serried phalanx lengthened stride to assault the foe at the double; at this moment, His Majesty, looking on, had leapt to his feet in terror for his army.
The Spartans knew how to attack wicker. They had practiced against it beneath the oaks on the field of Otona, in the countless repetitions when we squires and helots took station with practice shields, planted our heels and braced with all our strength, awaiting the massed shock of their assault. The Spartans knew the spear was worthless against the interlat-ticed staves; its shaft penetrated the wicker only to become imprisoned and impossible to extract. Likewise the thrust or slash of the xiphos, which caromed off as if striking iron. The enemy line must be struck, shock troop style, and overwhelmed, bowled over; it had to be hit so hard and with such concentrated force that its front-rankers caved and toppled, one rank backward upon another, like plateware in a cabinet when the earth quakes.
This is precisely what happened. The Median archers were drawn up not in a massed square front-to-back with each warrior reinforcing his comrades against the shock of assault, but honeycombed in alternating fronts, each rank at the shoulder of the one before it, so that the bowmen in the second could fire in the gaps left by the first, and on in this fashion rearward throughout the formation.
Moreover the enemy ranks were not stacked with the massed compaction of the Spartan phalanx.
There was a void, an interval between ranks dictated by the physical demands of the bow. The result of this was precisely what the Lakedaemonians expected: the forerank of the enemy collapsed immediately as the first shock hit it; the body-length shields seemed to implode rearward, their anchoring spikes rooted slinging from the earth like tent pins in a gale. The forerank archers were literally bowled off their feet, their wall-like shields caving in upon them like fortress redoubts under the assault of the ram. The Spartan advance ran right over them, and the second rank, and the third. The mob of enemy mid-rankers, urged on by their officers, sought desperately to dig in and hold. Closed breast-to-breast with the Spartan shock troops, the foe's bows were useless. They flung them aside, fighting with their belt scimitars. I saw an entire front of them, shieldless, slashing wildly with a blade in each hand. The valor of individual Medes was beyond question, but their light hacking blades were harmless as toys; against the massed wall of Spartan armor, they might as well have been defending themselves with reeds or fennel stalks.
We learned that evening, from Hellenic deserters who had fled in the confusion, that the foe's rearmost ranks, thirty and forty back from the front, had been pressed rearward so resistlessly by the collapse of the men up front that they began tumbling off the Trachinian track into the sea.
Pande-monium had apparently-reigned along a section several hundred yards long, beyond the Narrows, where the trail ran flush against the mountain wall, with the gulf yawning eighty feet below. Over this brink, the deserters reported, hapless lancers and archers had toppled by the score, clinging to the men before them and pulling these down with them to their deaths. His Majesty, we heard, was forced to witness this, as his vantage lay almost directly above the site.
This was the second moment, so the observers reported, when His Majesty sprung to his feet in dread for the fate of his warriors.
The ground immediately to the rear of the Spartan ad' vance, as expected, was littered with the trampled forms of the enemy dead and wounded. But there was a new wrinkle. The Medes had been overrun with such speed and force that numbers of them, far from inconsiderable, had survived intact. These now rose and attempted to rally, only to find themselves assaulted almost at once by the massed ranks of the allied reserves who were already advancing in formation to reinforce and relieve the Spartans. A second slaughter now ensued, as the Tegeates and Opountian Lokrians fell upon this yet-unreaped harvest. Tegea lies immediately adjacent to the territory of Lakedaemon. For centuries the Spartans and Tegeates had battled over the border plains before, in the previous three generations, becoming fast allies and comrades. Of all the Peloponnesians save the Spartans, the warriors of Tegea are the fiercest and most skilled. As for the Lokrians of Opus, this was their country they were fighting for; their homes and temples, fields and sanctuaries, lay within an hour's march of the Hot Gates. Quarter, they knew, stood not within the invader's lexicon; neither would it be found in theirs.
I was dragging a wounded Knight, Polynikes' friend Doreion, to the safety of the field's shoulder when my foot slipped in an ankle-deep stream. Twice I tried to regain balance and twice fell. I was cursing the earth. What perverse spring had suddenly burst forth from the mountainside when none had shown itself in this place before? I looked down. A river of blood covered both feet, draining across a gouge in the dirt like the gutter of an abattoir.
The Medes had cracked. The Tegeates and Opountian Lokrians surged in reinforcement through the ranks of the spent Spartans, pressing the assault upon the reeling enemy. It was the allies' turn now. Put the steel to 'em, boys! one among the Spartans cried as the wave of allied ranks advanced ten deep from the rear and both flanks and closed into a massed phalanx before the warriors of Sparta, who at last drew up, limbs quaking with fatigue, and collapsed against one another and upon the earth.
At last I found my master. He was on one knee, shattered with exhaustion, clinging with both fists to his shivered blade-bereft spear which was driven butt-spike-first into the earth and from which he hung like a broken marionette upon a stick. The weight of his helmet bore his head groundward; he possessed strength neither to lift it nor to pull it off. Alex-andros collapsed beside him, on all fours with the crown of his helmet, crest-first, mashed with exhaustion into the dirt. His rib cage heaved like a hound's, while spittle, phlegm and blood dripped from the bronze of his cheekpieces in a frothing lather.
Here came the Tegeates and Lokrians, surging past us.
There they went, driving the enemy before them.
For the first interval in what seemed an eternity, the dread of imminent extinction lifted. The Lakedaemonians dropped to the earth where they stood, on knees first, then knees and elbows, then simply sprawling, on sides and on backs, collapsing against one another, sucking breath in gasping labored need. Eyes stared vacantly, as if blind. None could summon strength to speak.
Weapons drooped of their own weight, in fists so cramped that the will could not compel the muscles to release their frozen grasp. Shields toppled to earth, bowl-down and defamed; exhausted men collapsed into them face-first and could not find strength even to turn their faces to the side to breathe.
A fistful of teeth spit from Alexandros' mouth. When he recovered strength sufficient to prise his helmet off, his long hair came out at the roots in wads, a tangled mass of salt sweat and matted blood. His eyes stared, blank as stones. He collapsed like a child, burying his face in my master's lap, weeping the dry tears of those whose shattered substance has no more fluid to spend.
Suicide came up, shot through both shoulders and oblivious with elation. He stood above the collapsed ranks of men, fearless, peering out to where the allies had now closed with the last of the Medes and were hacking them to pieces with such a grisly din that it seemed the slaughter was taking place ten paces away instead of a hundred.
I could see my master's eyes, pools of black behind the hooded eye-slits of his helmet. His hand gestured feebly to the empty spear sheath across my back. What happened to my spares? his throat croaked hoarsely.
I gave them away.
A moment passed while he waited for breath, To our own men, I hope.
I helped him off with his helmet. It seemed to take minutes, so swollen with sweat and blood was his felt undercap and the tangled clotted mass of his hair. The water bearers had arrived. None among the warriors possessed the strength even to cup his hands, so the liquid was simply splashed upon rags and blouses which the men pressed to their lips and sucked. Dienekes swabbed the tangled hair off his face. His left eye was gone. Sliced through, leaving a ghoulish socket of tissue and blood. I know was all he said.
Aristomenes and Bias and others of the platoon, Black Leon and Leon Donkeydick, now surfaced into view, gasping upon the earth, their arms and legs sliced and lacerated with innumerable slashes, glistening with mud and blood. They and other scrambled men from other scrambled units lay heaped upon one another like a frieze on a temple wall.
I knelt now at my master's side, pressing the water rag as a compress into the hollow where his eye had been. The fabric welled with fluid like a sponge.
Out front, where the enemy were falling back in wild disorder, the victors of the moment could see Polynikes, on his feet, alone, with his arms raised toward the fleeing foe. He wrenched his helmet from his skull, dripping blood and sweat, and flung it in triumph upon the earth.
Not today, you sons of whores! he bellowed at the foe in flight. Not today!
I cannot state with certainty how many times on that first day each allied contingent took its turn upon the triangle bounded by the Narrows and the mountain face, the sea cliffs and the Phokian Wall. I can declare with conviction only that my master went through four shields, two whose oak underchassis were shattered by repeated blows, one whose bronze plexus was staved in and a fourth whose gripcord and forearm sheath were ripped right out of their sockets. Replacements were not hard to find. One had only to stoop, so many were the discards littered upon the field, with their owners dead and dying beside them.
Of the sixteen in my master's enomotia were slain on that first day Lampitos, Soobiades, Telemon, Sthlenelaides, Aris-ton and grievously wounded Nikandros, Myron, Charillon and Bias.
Ariston fell in the fourth and final siege, that against His Majesty's Immortals. Ariston was that youth of twenty years, one of Polynikes' broken noses, whose sister Agathe had been given as a bride to Alexandras. That made them brothers-in-law.
The retrieval party found Ariston's body around mid-night, along the mountain wall. His squire Demades' form lay sprawled atop Ariston's with his shield still in place seeking to protect his master, both of whose shins had been shattered by the blows of a sagaris battle-axe. The shaft of an enemy lance was broken off just beneath Demades' left nipple. Although Ariston had sustained more than twenty wounds upon his own body, it was a single blow to the head, apparently delivered with some kind of mace or battle sledge, which had ultimately slain him, crushing both helmet and skull directly above the eyeline.
The tickets of the dead were customarily held and distributed by the chief battle priest, in this case Alexandras' father, the polemarch Olympieus. He himself had been killed, however, slain by a Persian arrow an hour before nightfall, just prior to the final clash with the Persian Immortals.
Olympieus had taken shelter with his men on the rampart of the Wall, in the lee of the palisade, preparatory to arming himself for the day's final siege. Of all things, he was writing in his journal. The unburned timbers of the palisade protected him, he thought; he had stripped helmet and cuirass. But the arrow, guided by some perverse fate, pierced the single opening available to it, a space no wider than a man's hand. It struck Olympieus in the cervical spine, severing the spinal cord. He died minutes later, without regaining speech or consciousness, in his son's arms.
With that, Alexandras had lost father and brother-in-law in a single afternoon.
Among the Spartans, the most grievous casualties of the first day were suffered by the Knights.
Of thirty, seventeen were either killed or incapacitated too severely to fight. Le-onidas was wounded six times but walked off the field under his own power. Astonishingly Polynikes, fighting all day in the forefront of the bloodiest action, had sustained no more than the slashes and lacerations incidental to action, a number of them doubtless inflicted by his own errant steel and that of his mates. He had, however, severely strained both hamstrings and pulled his left shoulder, simply from exertion and the excessive demands made upon the flesh in moments of supreme necessity. His squire, Akanthus, had been killed defending him, lucklessly like Olympieus, just minutes before the cessation of the day's slaughter.
The second attack had commenced at noon. These were the mountain warriors of Cissia. None among the allies even knew where the hell this place was, but wherever it was, it bred men of ungodly valor. Cissia, the allies learned later, is a country of stem and hostile highlands not far from Babylon, dense with ravines and defiles. This contingent of the enemy, far from being daunted by the cliff wall of Kallidromos, took this obstacle in stride, clambering up and along its face, rolling stones down indiscriminately upon their own troops as well as the allies. I myself could not view this struggle directly, being stationed during that interval behind the Wall, all efforts consumed with tending my master's wounds and those of our platoon and looking to their and my own necessaries. But I could hear it. It sounded like the whole mountain coming down.
At one point, from where Dienekes and Alexandros were, in the Spartan camp a hundred feet rearward of the Wall, we could see the ready platoons, in this rotation the Mantinean and the Arkadians, pouring up to the battlements of the Wall and there hurling javelins, spears and even dismantled boulders down upon the attackers, who, in the elation of the triumph they thought at hand, were keening a bloodcurdling wail which I can only replicate as Elelelelele.
The Thebans, we learned that evening, were the ones who threw back the Cissian assault. These warriors of Thebes held the right flank, as the allies saw it, alongside the sea cliffs. Their commander, Leontiades, and the picked champions fighting alongside him managed to secure a breach in the mob of the enemy, about forty feet out from the cliffs. The Thebans poured into this break and began shoving the cutoff ranks of the foe, about twenty files in breadth, toward the cliffs. Again the weight of the allied armor proved irresistible. The enemy right were rooted backward by the press of their own failing comrades. They toppled into the sea, as before in the rout of the Medes, clutching at the trousers, sword belts and finally the ankles of their fellows, pulling them over with them. The scale and celerity of the slaughter had clearly been massive, made more so by the ghastly manner in which the slain perished, that is, tumbling eighty and a hundred feet to have their bodies broken upon the rocks below or, escaping that, to drown in armor in the sea. Even from our position an eighth of a mile away and above the din of battle, we could hear plainly the cries of the falling men.
The Sacae were the next nation elected by Xerxes to assault the allies. These massed below the Narrows around midafternoon. They were plainsmen and mountain men, warriors of the eastern empire, and the bravest of all the troops the allies faced. They fought with battle-axes and inflicted, for a time, the most grisly casualties upon the Greeks. Yet in the end their own courage was their undoing. They did not break or panic; they simply came on in wave after wave, clawing over the fallen bodies of their brothers to hurl themselves as if seeking their own slaughter upon the shields and iron spearpoints of the Greeks. Against these Sacae were arrayed at first the Mycenaeans, the Corinthians and the Phliasians, with the Spartans, Tegeates and Thespians in ready reserve. These last were flung into battle almost at once, as the Mycenaeans and Corinthians spent themselves in the mill of murder and became too exhausted to continue. The reserves likewise became shattered with fatigue and themselves had to be relieved by the third rotation of Orchomenians and other Arkadians, these last having barely gotten out of the previous melee and had time to gnaw a hard biscuit and gulp down a snootful of wine.
By the time the Sacae broke, the sun was well over the mountain. The dance floor, now in full shadow, looked like a field ploughed by the oxen of hell. Not an inch remained unchurned and unriven. The rock-hard earth, sodden now with blood and piss and the unholy fluids which had spilled from the entrails of the slain and the butchered, lay churned in places to the depth of a man's calf. There is a spring sacred to Persephone, behind the sallyport adjacent to the Lakedaemonian camp, where in the morning, immediately following the repulsion of the Median assault, the Spartans and Thespians had collapsed in exhaustion and triumph. In that initial instant of salvation, however temporary all knew it must be, a flush of supreme joy had flooded over the entire allied camp. Panoplied men faced one another and slammed shields together, just for the joy of it, like boys rejoicing in the clamor of bronze upon bronze. I saw two warriors of the Arkadians standing face-to-face, pounding each other with fists upon the shoulders of their leathers, tears of joy streaming down their faces. Others whooped and danced. One warrior of the Phliasians grasped the corner of the redoubt with both hands and pounded his helmeted brow against the stone, bang bang bang, like a lunatic. Others writhed upon the ground, as horses will do sand-bathing, so overflushed with joy that they could discharge its excess in no other way.
Simultaneously a second wave of emotion coursed through the camp. This was of piety. Men embraced one another, weeping in awe before the gods. Prayers of thanksgiving were sung from fervent hearts, and none took shame to voice them. Across the expanse of the camp, one saw knots of warriors kneeling in invocation, circles of a dozen with clasped hands, knots of three and four with arms around each other's shoulders, pairs crouching knee-to-knee and everywhere individuals upon the earth in prayer.
Now, seven hours into the slaughter, all such observance of piety had fled. Men stared with hollow eyes upon the riven plain. Across this farmer's field of death lay sown such a crop of corpses and shields, hacked-up armor and shattered weapons, that the mind could not assimilate its scale nor the senses give it compass. The wounded, in numbers uncountable, groaned and cried out, writhing amid piles of limbs and severed body parts so intertangled one could not distinguish individual men, but the whole seemed a Gorgon-like beast of ten thousand limbs, some ghastly monster spawned by the cloven earth and now draining itself, fluid by fluid, back into that chthonic cleft which had given it birth. Along the face of the mountain the stone glistened scarlet to the height of a man's knee.
The faces of the allied warriors had by this hour clotted into featureless masks of death. Blank eyes stared from sunken sockets as if the divine force, the daimon, had been extinguished like a lamp, replaced by a weariness beyond description, a stare without effect, the hollow gaze of hell itself. I turned to Alexandros; he looked fifty years old. In the mirror of his eyes I beheld my own face and could no longer recognize it.
A temper toward the enemy now arose which had not been present before. This was not hatred but rather a refusal to reckon quarter. A reign of savagery began. Acts of barbarity which had been hitherto unthinkable now presented themselves to the mind and were embraced without a quibble. The theater of war, the stink and spectacle of carnage on such a scale, had so overwhelmed the senses with horror that the mind had grown numb and insensate. With perverse wit, it actually sought these and sought to intensify them.
All knew that the next attack would be the day's last; nightfall's curtain would adjourn the slaughter until tomorrow. It was also clear that whichever force the foe next threw into the line would be his finest, the cream saved for this hour when the Hellenes labored in exhaustion and stood the likeliest chance of being overthrown by fresh troops. Leoni-das, who had not slept now in more than forty hours, yet prowled the lines of defenders, assembling each allied unit and addressing it in person. Remember, brothers: the final fight is everything. All we have achieved so far this day is lost if we do not prevail now, at the end. Fight as you have never fought before.
In the intervals between the first three assaults, each warrior readying for the next engagement had striven to scour clean the face of his shield and helmet, to present again to the foe the gleaming terror-inspiring surface of bronze. As the threshing mill of murder progressed throughout the day, however, this housekeeping became honored increasingly in the breach, as each knurl and inlay on the shield acquired a grisly encrustment of blood and dirt, mud and excrement, fragments of tissue, flesh, hair and gore of every description. Besides, the men were too tired. They didn't care anymore. Now Dithyrambos, the Thespian captain, sought to make a virtue of necessity. He ordered his men to cease from burnishing their shields, and instead to paint and streak them, and the men's own body armor, with yet more blood and gore.
This Dithyrambos, by trade an architect and by no means a professional soldier, had already distinguished himself with such magnificent courage throughout the day that the prize of valor, it was a foregone conclusion, would be his by acclamation. His gallantry had elevated him second only to Leoni-das in prestige among the men. Dithyrambos now, stationing himself in the open in full view of all the men, proceeded to smear his own shield, which was already nearly black with dried blood, with yet more gore and guts and fresh dripping fluid. The allies in line, the Thespians, Tegeates and Man-tineans, ghoulishly followed suit. The Spartans alone abstained, not out of delicacy or decorum, but simply in obedience to their own laws of campaign, which command them to adhere without alteration to their customary disciplines and practices of arms.
Dithyrambos now ordered the squires and servants to hold their places, to refrain from sweeping the advance ground of enemy bodies. Instead, he sent his own men out onto the arena with orders to heap the corpses in display in the most ghoulish manner possible, so as to present to the next wave of the foe, whose marshaling trumpets could already be heard around the shoulder of the Narrows, the most ghastly and terrifying spectacle possible.
Brothers and allies, my own beautiful dogs from hell! he addressed the warriors, striding helmetless before the lines, his voice carrying powerfully even to those upon the Wall and marshaling in the ready-ground behind. This next wave will be the day's last. Cinch up your balls, men, for one final surpassing effort. The enemy believes us exhausted and anticipates dispatching us to the underworld beneath his onslaught of fresh, rested troops. What he doesn't know is we're already there. We crossed the line hours ago. He gestured to the Narrows and its carpeting of horror. We stand already in hell. It is our home!
A cheer rose from the line, overtopped by wild profane shouts and whoops of hellish laughter.
Remember, men, Dithyrambos' voice rose yet more powerfully, that this next wave of Asiatic ass-fuckers has not seen us yet. Consider what they have seen. They know only that three of their mightiest nations have advanced against us wearing their testicles and come back without them.
And I promise you: they are not fresh. They've been sitting on their dogblossoms all day, watching their allies carried and dragged back, hacked to pieces by us. Believe me, their imaginations have not been idle. Each man has conjured his own head cleaved at the neck, his own guts spilling into the dirt and his own cock and balls brandished before him on the point of a Greek spear! We're not the ones who are worn out, they are!
Fresh shouting and tumult erupted from the allies, save the Spartans, while the Thespians on the field continued their butchery. I glanced to Dienekes, who observed this all with a grim twist upon his features.
By the gods, he declared, it's getting ugly out there.
We could see the Spartan Knights, led by Polynikes and Doreion, taking their stations about Leonidas in the forefront of the line. Now a lookout came running back in from the forwardmost post. This was Hound, the Spartan Skirite; he sprinted straight to Leonidas and made his report.
The news spread swiftly: the next wave would be Xerxes' own household guard, the Immortals.
The Greeks knew that these comprised His Majesty's picked champions, the flower of Persian nobility, princes schooled from birth to draw the bow and speak the truth.
More to the point, their numbers were ten thousand, while the Greeks had fewer than three thousand still fit to fight. The Immortals, all knew, derived their name from the custom of the Persians that replaced at once each royal guardsman who died or retired, thus keeping the number of Xerxes' finest always at ten thousand.
This corps of champions now advanced into view at the neck of the Narrows. They wore not helmets, but tiaras, soft felt caps topped with skull-crowns of metal glistening like gold. These half-helmets possessed no cover for the ears, neck or jaw and left the face and throat entirely exposed. The warriors wore earrings; some of their faces were painted with eye kohl and rouged like women. Nonetheless they were magnificent specimens, selected it seemed not merely, as the Hellenes well knew, for valor and nobility of family but for height and handsomeness of person as well. Each man looked more dashing than the fellow at his shoulder. They wore sleeved tunics of silk, purple rimmed with scarlet, protected by a sleeveless coat of mail in the shape of fish scales, and trousers atop calf-height doeskin boots. Their weapons were the bow, belt scimitar and short Persian lance, and their shields, like the Medes' and the Cissians', were shoulder-togroiners made of wicker. Most astonishing of all, however, was the quantity of gold ornament each Immortal wore upon his person in the form of brooches and bracelets, amulets and adornments. Their commander, Hydarnes, advanced to the fore, the only mounted antagonist the allies had so far beheld. His tiara was peaked like a monarch's crown and his eyes shone brilliantly beneath kohled lashes. His horse was spooking, refusing to advance across the charnel sward of corpses. The foe drew up in ranks on the flat beyond the Narrows. Their discipline was impeccable. They were spotless.
Leonidas now strode forth to address the allies. He confirmed what each Hellenic warrior presumed by sight, that the division of the enemy now advancing into view was indeed Xerxes' own Immortals and that the number of their company, as nearly as could be estimated by eye, was the full ten thousand.
It would appear, gentlemen, Leonidas' voice ascended powerfully, that the prospect of facing the picked champions of alt Asia should daunt us. But I swear to you, this battle will prove the most dustless of all.
The king used the Greek word akoniti, whose application is customarily to wrestling, boxing and the pankration. When a victor overthrows his opponent so swiftly that the bout fails even to raise the dust of the arena, he is said to have triumphed akoniti, in a no-duster.
Listen, Leonidas proceeded, and I will tell you why. The troops Xerxes throws at us now are, for the first time, of actual Persian blood. Their commanders are the King's own kinsmen; he has brothers out there, and cousins and uncles and lovers, officers of his own line whose lives are precious to him beyond price. Do you see him up there, upon his throne? The nations he has sent against us so far have been mere vassal states, spear fodder to such a despot, who squanders their lives without counting the cost. These-Leonidas gestured across the Narrows to the space where Hydarnes and the Immortals now marshaled-these he treasures. These he loves. Their murder he will feel like an eight-footer in the guts.
Remember that this battle at the Hot Gates is not the one Xerxes came here to fight. He anticipates far more momentous struggles to come, in the heartland of Hellas against the main force of our armies, and for these clashes he wishes to preserve the flower of his army, the men you see before you now. He will be frugal with their lives today, I promise you.
As to their numbers: they are ten thousand, we are four. But each man we slay will sting like a regiment to their King. These warriors are to him like miser's gold, which he hoards and covets beyond all else in his treasury.
Kill one thousand and the rest will crack. One thousand and their master will pull the remainder out. Can you do that for me, men? Can four of you kill one of them? Can you give me one thousand?
His Majesty himself may best judge the precision of Leon-Idas' forecast. Suffice it to note, for this record, that darkness found the Immortals in shattered retreat, under His Majesty's orders as Leonidas had predicted, leaving the broken and dying upon the orchestra, the dance floor, of the Narrows.
Behind the allied Wall the spectacle was one of corresponding horror. A downpour had drenched the camp shortly after nightfall, drowning what few fires remained with none to tend them, all effort of squires, attendants and mates being required to succor the wounded and the maimed.
Slides toppled from the wall of Kallidromos, sluicing the upper camp with rivers of mud and stone. Across this sodden expanse, slain and spared sprawled limb upon limb, many still in armor, the slumber of the exhausted so profound that one could not distinguish the living from the dead. Everything was soaked and muck-begrimed. Stores of dressings for the wounded had long since been depleted; the spa-goers' tents requisitioned by the Skiritai rangers as shelter now found their linen called to duty a second time, as battle compresses. The stink of blood and death rose with such palpable horror that the asses of the supply train bawled all night and could not be quietened.
There was a third unrostered member of the allied contingent, a volunteer other than the outlaw Ball Player and the roan bitch Styx. This was an emporos, a merchant of Miletus, Elephantinos by name, whose disabled waggon the allied column had chanced upon during its march through Doris, a day prior to arrival at the Gates. This fellow despite his misfortune of the road maintained the merriest of spirits, sharing a lunch of green apples with his hobbled ass. Upon the brow of his waggon rose a hand-painted standard, an advertisement as it were of his congeniality and eagerness of custom. The sign intended to declare, The best service only for you, my friend. The tinker had misspelled, however, several words, chiefly friend, philos, which his hand had inscribed phimos, the term in Doric for a contraction of the flesh which covers the male member. The waggon's banner declared roughly thus:
The best service only for you, my foreskin.
The luster of this poesy rendered the fellow an instant celebrity. Several squires were detached to assist him, for which courtesy the tradesman expressed abounding gratitude. And where, if one may inquire, is this magnificent army bound?
To die for Hellas, someone answered.
How delightful! Toward midnight the tinker appeared in camp, having tracked the column all the way to the Gates. He was welcomed with enthusiasm. His specialty lay in applying an edge to steel, and at this, he testified, he stood without peer. He had been sharpening farmers' scythes and housewives' cleavers for decades. He knew how to make even the meanest untempered trowel hold an edge, and moreover, he vowed, he would donate his services to the army in repayment of their kindness upon the highway.
The fellow employed an expression with which he spiked his conversation whenever he wished to emphasize a point.
Wake up to this! he would say, though in his dense Ionian accent it came out as Week up to thees!
This phrase was immediately and with high glee adopted by the entire army.
Cheese and onions again, week up to thees!
Double drill all day, week up to thees!
One of the two Leons in Dienekes' platoon, Donkeydick, rousted the merchant that succeeding dawn by brandishing before his slumber-dazed eyes a prodigious erection. They call this a phimos, week up to thees!
The tradesman became a kind of mascot or talisman to the troops. His presence was welcomed at every fire, his company embraced by youths as well as veterans; he was considered a raconteur and boon companion, a jester and a friend.
Now in the wake of this first day's slaughter, the merchant appointed himself as well unofficial chaplain and confessor to the young warriors whom he had over the past days come to care for more intimately than sons. He passed all night among the wounded, bearing wine, water and a consoling hand. His accustomed cheerfulness he contrived to redouble; he diverted the maimed and mutilated with profane tales of his travels and misadventures, seductions of housewives, robberies and thrashings sustained upon the road. He had armed himself as well, from the discards; he would fill a gap tomorrow. Many of the squires, uncompelled by their masters, had taken upon themselves the same role.
All night the forges roared. The hammers of the smiths and foundrymen rang without ceasing, repairing spear and sword blades, beating out the bronze for fresh shield facings, while wrights and carpenters manned spokeshaves limning fresh spearshafts and shield carriages for the morrow. The allies cooked their meals over fires made from the spent arrows and shivered spearshafts of the enemy. The natives of Alpenoi village who a day earlier had peddled their produce for profit, now, beholding the sacrifice of the defenders, donated their goods and foodstuffs and hastened off with shuttles and handbarrows to bear up more.
Where were the reinforcements? Were any coming at all? Leonidas, sensing the preoccupation of the army, eschewed all assembly and councils of war, circulating instead in person among the men, transacting the business of the commanders as he went. He was dispatching more runners to the cities, with more appeals for aid. Nor was it lost upon the warriors that he selected always the youngest. Was this for speed of foot, or the king's wish to spare those whose share of remaining years was the greatest?
Each soldier's thoughts turned now toward his family, to those at home whom his heart loved.
Shivering, exhausted men scribbled letters to wives and children, mothers and fathers, many of these missives little more than scratches upon cloth or leather, fragments of ceramic or wood.
The letters were wills and testaments, final words of farewell. I saw the dispatch pouch of one runner preparing to depart; it was a jumble of paper rolls, wax tablets, potshards, even felt scraps torn from helmet undercaps. Many of the warriors simply sent amulets which their loved ones would recognize, a charm that had pended from the chassis of a shield, a good-luck coin drilled through for a neckband. Some of these bore salutations-Beloved Amaris… Delia from Thea-gones, love. Others bore no name at all. Perhaps the runners of each city knew the addressees personally and could take it upon themselves to ensure delivery. If not, the contents of the pouch would be displayed in the public square or the agora, perhaps set out before the temple of the city's Protectress. There the anxious families would congregate in hope and trepidation, awaiting their turn to pore through the precious cargo, desperate for any message, wordless or otherwise, from those whom they loved and feared to behold again only in death.
Two messengers came in from the allied fleet, from the Athenian corvette assigned as courier between the navy below and the army up top. The allies had engaged the Persian fleet this day, inconclusively, but without buckling. Our ships must hold the straits or Xerxes could land his army in the defenders' rear and cut them off; the troops must hold the pass or the Persian could advance by land to the narrows of the Euripus and trap the fleet. So far, neither had cracked.
Polynikes came and sat for a few minutes beside the fires around which the remains of our platoon had gathered. He had located a renowned gymnastes, an athletic trainer named Milon, whom he knew from the Games at Olympia. This fellow had wrapped Polynikes' hamstrings and given him a pharmakon to kill the pain.
Have you had enough of glory, Kallistos? Dienekes inquired of the Knight. Polynikes answered only with a look of surpassing grim-ness. He seemed chastened, out of himself for once.
Sit down, my master said, indicating a dry space beside him.
Polynikes settled gratefully. Around the circle the platoon slumbered like dead men, heads pillowed upon each other and their yet-gore-encrusted shields. Directly across from Polynikes, Alexandras stared with awful blankness into the fire. His jaw had been broken; the entire right side of his face glistened purple; the bone itself was cinched shut with a leather strap.
Let's have a look at you. Polynikes craned forward. He located among the trainer's kit a waxed wad of euphorbia and amber called a boxer's lunch, the kind pugilists employ between matches to immobilize broken bones and teeth. This Polynikes kneaded warm until it became pliable. He turned to the trainer. You better do this, Milon. Polynikes took Alexandras' right hand in his own, for the pain. Hang on. Squeeze till you break my fingers.
The trainer spit from his own mouth into Alexandras' a purge of uncut wine to cleanse the clotted blood, then with his fingers extracted a grotesque gob of spittle, mucus and phlegm. I held Alexandras' head; the youth's fist clamped Polynikes'. Dienekes watched as the trainer inserted the sticky amber wad between Alexandras' jaws, then gently clamped the shattered bone down tight upon it. Count slowly, he instructed the patient. When you hit fifty, you won't be able to prise that jaw apart with a crowbar.
Alexandras released the Knight's hand. Polynikes regarded him with sorrow.
Forgive me, Alexandros.
For what?
For breaking your nose.
Alexandros laughed, his broken jaw making him grimace.
It's your best feature now.
Alexandros winced again. I'm sorry about your father, Polynikes said. And Ariston.
He rose to move on to the next fire, glancing once to my master, then returning his gaze to Alexandros.
There is something I must tell you. When Leonidas selected you for the Three Hundred, I went to him in private and argued strenuously against your inclusion. I thought you would not fight.
I know, Alexandros' voice ground through his cinched jaw.
Polynikes studied him a long moment.
I was wrong, he said.
He moved on.
Another round of orders came, assigning parties to retrieve corpses from no-man's-land. Suicide's name was among those detailed. Both his shot shoulders had seized up; Alexandros insisted on taking his place.
By now the king will know about the deaths of my father and Ariston. He addressed Dienekes, who as his platoon commander could forbid him to participate in the retrieval detail. Leonidas will try to spare me for my family's sake; he'll send me home with some errand or dispatch. I don't wish to disrespect him by refusing.
I had never beheld such an expression of balefulness as that which now framed itself upon my master's face. He gestured to a flat of sodden earth beside him in the firelight.
I've been watching these little myrmidons.
There in the dirt, a war of the ants was raging.
Look at these champions. Dienekes indicated the massed battalions of insects grappling with impossible valor atop a pile of their own fellows' fallen forms, battling over the desiccated corpse of a beetle.
This one here, this would be Achilles. And there. That must be Hektor. Our bravery is nothing alongside these heroes'. See? They even drag their comrades' bodies from the field, as we do.
His voice was dense with disgust and stinking with irony. Do you think the gods look down on us as we do upon these insects? Do the immortals mourn our deaths as keenly as we feel the loss of these?
Get some sleep, Dienekes, Alexandros said gently.
Yes, that's what I need. My beauty rest.
He lifted his remaining eye toward Alexandros. Out beyond the redoubts of the Wall, the second watch of sentries was receiving their orders, preparatory to relieving the first. Your father was my mentor, Alexandros. I bore the chalice the night you were born. I remember Olympieus presenting your infant form to the elders, for the 'ten, ten and one' test, to see if you were deemed healthy enough to be allowed to live. The magistrate bathed you in wine and you came up squawling, with your infant's voice strong and your little fists clenched and waving. 'Hand the boy to Dienekes,' your fa-ther instructed Paraleia. 'My son will be your protege,' Olympieus told me. 'You will teach him, as I have taught you.'
Dienekes' right hand plunged the blade of his xiphos into the dirt, annihilating the Iliad of the ants. Now sleep, all of you! he barked to the men yet surviving of his platoon and, himself rising, despite all protests that he, too, embrace the boon of slumber, strode off alone toward Leonidas' command post, where the king and the other commanders yet stood to their posts, awake and planning the morrow's action.
I saw Dienekes' hip give way beneath him as he moved; not the bad leg, but the sound. He was concealing from his men's sight yet another wound-from the cast of his gait, deep and crippling.
I rose at once and hastened to his aid.
That spring called the Skyllian, sacred to Demeter and Persephone, welled from the base of the wall of Kal-lidromos just to the rear of Leonidas' command post. Upon its stone-founded approach my master drew up, and I hurrying in his wake overhauled him. No curses or commands to withdraw rebuffed me. I draped his arm about my neck and took his weight upon my shoulder. I'll get water, I said.
An agitated knot of warriors had clustered about the spring; Megistias the seer was there.
Something was amiss. I pressed closer. This spring, renowned for its alternating flows of cold and hot, had gushed since the allies' arrival with naught but sweet cold water, a boon from the goddesses to the warriors' thirst. Now suddenly the fount had gone hot and stinking. A steaming sulphurous brew spewed forth from the underworld like a river of hell. The men trembled before this prodigy. Prayers to Demeter and the Kore were being sung. I begged a half-helmetful of water from the Knight Doreion's skin and returned to my master, steeling myself to mention nothing.
The spring's gone sulphurous, hasn't it?
It presages the enemy's death, sir, not ours.
You're as full of shit as the priests.
I could see he was all right now.
The allies need your cousin upon this site, he observed, settling in pain upon the earth, to intercede with the goddess on their behalf.
He meant Diomache.
Here, he said. Sit beside me.
This was the first time I had heard my master refer aloud to Diomache, or even acknowledge his awareness of her existence. Though I had never, in our years, presumed to burden him with details of my own history prior to entering his service, I knew he knew it all, through Alexandros and the lady Arete.
This is a goddess I have always felt pity for-Persephone, my master declared. Six months of the year she rules as Hades' bride, mistress of the underworld. Yet hers is a reign bereft of joy.
She sits her throne as a prisoner, carried off for her beauty by the lord of hell, who releases his queen under Zeus' compulsion for half the year only, when she comes back to us, bringing spring and the rebirth of the land. Have you looked closely at statues of her, Xeo? She appears grave, even in the midst of the harvest's joy. Does she, like us, recall the terms of her sentence-to retire again untimely beneath the earth? This is the sorrow of Persephone. Alone among the immortals the Kore is bound by necessity to shuttle from death to life and back again, intimate of both faces of the coin. No wonder this fount whose twin sources are heaven and hell is sacred to her.
I had settled now upon the ground beside my master. He regarded me gravely.
It's too late, don't you think, he pronounced, for you and I to keep secrets from one another?
I agreed the hour was far advanced.
Yet you preserve one from me.
He would have me speak of Athens, I could see, and the evening barely a month previous wherein I had at last- through his intercession-met again my cousin.
Why didn't you run? Dienekes asked me. I wanted you to, you know.
I tried. She wouldn't let me.
I knew my master would not compel me to speak. He would never presume to tread where his presence sowed distress. Yet instinct told me the hour to break silence had come. At worst my report would divert his preoccupation from the day's horror and at best turn it, perhaps, to more propitious imaginings.
Shall I tell you of that night in Athens, sir?
Only if you wish.
It was upon an embassy, I reminded him. He, Polynikes and Aristodemos had traveled on foot from Sparta then, without escort, accompanied only by their squires. The party had covered the distance of 140 miles in four days and remained there in the city of the Athenians for four more, at the home of the proxenos Kleinias the son of Alkibiades. The object of the legation was to finalize the eleventh-hour details of coordinating land and sea forces at Thermopylae and Artemisium: times of arrival for army and fleet, modes of dispatch between them, courier encryptions, passwords and the like. Unspoken but no less significant, Spartans and Athenians wished to look each other in the eye one last time, to make sure both forces would be there, in their places, at the appointed hour.
On the evening of the third day, a salon was held in honor of the embassy at the home of Xanthippus, a prominent Athenian. I loved to listen at these affairs, where debate and discourse were always spirited and often brilliant. To my great disappointment, my master summoned me alone before table and informed me of an urgent errand I must run. Sorry, he said, you'll miss the party. He placed into my hands a sealed letter, with instructions to deliver it in person to a certain residence in the seaport town of Phaleron. A boy servant of the house awaited without, to serve as guide through the nighttime streets. No particulars were given beyond the addressee's name. I assumed the communication to be a naval dispatch of some urgency and so traveled armed.
It took the time of an entire watch to traverse that labyrinth of quarters and precincts which comprises the city of the Athenians. Everywhere men-at-arms, sailors and marines were mobilizing; chandlery waggons rumbled under armed escorts, bearing the rations and supplies of the fleet. The squadrons under Themistokles were readying for embarkation to Skiathos and Artemisium. Simultaneously families by the hundreds were crating their valuables and fleeing the city. As numerous as were the warcraft moored in lines across the harbor, their ranks were eclipsed by the ragtag fleet of merchantmen, ferries, fishing smacks, pleasure boats and excursion craft evacuating the citizenry to Troezen and Salamis. Some of the families were fleeing for points as distant as Italia, As the boy and I approached Phaleron port, so many torches filled the streets that the passage was lit bright as noon.
Lanes became crookeder as we approached the harbor. The stink of low tide choked one's nostrils; gutters ran with filth, backed up into a malodorous stew of fish guts, leek shavings and garlic. I never saw so many cats in my life. Grogshops and houses of ill fame lined streets so narrow that daylight's cleansing beams, I was certain, never penetrated to the floors of their canyons to dry the slime and muck of the night's commerce in depravity. The whores called out boldly as the boy and I passed, advertising their wares in coarse but good-humored tongue. The man to whom we were to deliver the letter was named Terrentaius. I asked the lad if he had any idea who the fellow was or what station he held. He said he had been given the house name alone and nothing more.
At last the boy and I located it, an apartment structure of three stories called the Griddle after the slop shop and inn which occupied its street-level floor. I inquired within for the man Terrentaius.
He was absent, the publican declared, with the fleet. I asked after the man's ship. Which vessel was he officer of? A round of hilarity greeted this query. He's a lieutenant of the ash, one of the tippling seamen declared, meaning the only thing he commanded was the oar he pulled. Further inquiries failed to elicit any additional intelligence. Then, sir, the boy guide addressed me, we are instructed to deliver the letter to his wife.
I rejected this as nonsense.
No, sir, replied the lad with conviction, I have it from your master himself. We are to place the letter in the hands of the man's mistress, by name Diomache.
With but a moment's consideration I perceived in this event the hand, not to say the long arm, of the lady Arete. How had she tracked down and located, from the remove of Lakedaemon, this house and this woman? There must be a hundred Diomaches in a city the size of Athens. No doubt the lady Arete had maintained her intentions secret, anticipating that I, made aware of them in advance, would have found excuse to evade their obligation. In this, she was doubtless correct.
In any event my cousin, it was discovered, was not present in the apartments, nor could any of the seamen inform us as to her whereabouts. My guide, a lad of resourcefulness, simply stepped into the alley and bellowed her name. In moments the grizzled heads of half a dozen backstreet dames appeared above, among the hanging laundry of the lane-facing windows. The name and site of a harbor-town temple were shouted down to us.
She'll be there, boy. Just follow the shore.
My guide set out again in the lead. We traversed more stinking sea-town streets, more alleys choked with traffic of the natives clearing out. The boy informed me that many of the temples in this quarter functioned less as sanctuaries of the gods and more as asylums for the cast-out and the penniless, particularly, he said, wives put by by their husbands. Meaning those deemed unfit, unwilling, or even insane. The boy pressed ahead in merry spirits. It was all a grand adventure to him.
At last we stood before the temple. It was nothing but a common house, perhaps home in former times to a middling-prosperous trader or merchant, sited upon a surprisingly cheerful slope two streets above the water. A copse of olives sheltered a walled enclave whose inner precinct could not be glimpsed from the street. I rapped at the gate; after an interval a priestess, if such a lofty title may be applied to a gowned and masked housewoman of fifty years, responded. She informed us the sanctuary was that of Demeter and Covert Kore, Persephone of the Veil. None but females might enter. Behind the shroud which concealed her face, the priestess was clearly frightened, nor could one blame her, the streets running with whoremongers and cutpurses. She would not let us in. No avenue of appeal proved of avail; the woman would neither confirm my cousin's presence nor agree to convey a message within. Again my boy guide took the bull by the horns. He opened his cheesepipe and bawled Diomache's name.
We were admitted at last to a rear courtyard, the lad and I. The house upon entry proved far more capacious, and a good deal cheerier, than it had appeared from the street. We were not permitted passage through the interior but escorted along an outer path. The dame, our chaperon, confirmed that a matron by name Diomache was indeed among those novices currently resident within the sanctuary. She was at this hour attending to duties in the kitchen; an interview, however, of a few minutes' duration might be granted, with permission from the asylum mother. My guide, the boy, was offered refreshment; the dame took him away for a feed.
I was standing, alone in the courtyard, when my cousin entered. Her children, both girls, one perhaps five, the other a year or two older, clung fearfully to her skirts; they would not come forward when I knelt and held out my hand. Forgive them, my cousin said. They are shy of men. The dame led the girls away to the interior, leaving me at last alone with Diomache.
How many times in imagination had I rehearsed this moment. Always in conjured scenarios, my cousin was young and beautiful; I ran to her arms and she to mine. Nothing of the sort now occurred. Diomache stepped into view in the lamplight, garbed in black, with the entire breadth of the court dividing us. The shock of her appearance unstrung me. She was unveiled and unhooded. Her hair was cropped short. Her years were no more than twenty-four yet she looked forty, and a hard-used forty at that.
Can it really be you, cousin? she inquired in the same teasing voice she had taken with me since we were children. You are a man, as you were always so impatient to become.
Her lightness of tone served only to compound the despair which now seized my heart. The picture I had held so long before the eye of the mind was of her in the bloom of youth, womanly and strong, exactly as she had been the morning we parted at the Three-Cornered Way. What terrible hardships had been visited upon her by the intervening years? The vision of the whoreinfested streets was fresh upon me, the crude seamen and the mean existence of these refusechoked lanes. I sank, overcome with grief and regret, upon a bench along the wall.
I should never have left you, I said, and meant it with all my heart. Everything that has happened is my fault for not being at your side to defend you.
I cannot recall a word of what was spoken over the next several minutes. I remember my cousin moving to the bench beside me. She did not embrace me, but touched me with tender clemency upon the shoulder.
Do you remember that morning, Xeo, when we set out for market with Stumblefoot and your little clutch of ptarmigan eggs? Her lips declined into a sorrowful smile. The gods set our lives upon their courses that day. Courses from which neither of us has had the option to stray.
She asked if I would take wine. A bowl was brought. I recalled the letter I bore and delivered it now to my cousin.
Beneath its wrapper, it was addressed to her, not her hus-band; she opened and read it. Its contents were in the lady Arete's hand. When Diomache finished she did not show it to me, but tucked it away without a word beneath her robe. My eyes, adjusted now to the lamplight of the court, studied my cousin's face. Her beauty remained, I saw, but altered in a manner both grave and austere. The age in her eyes, which had at first shocked and repelled me, I now perceived as compassion and even wisdom. Her silence was profound as the lady Arete's; her bearing spartan beyond spartan. I was daunted and even in awe. She seemed, like the goddess she served, a maiden hauled off untimely by the dark forces of the underworld and now, restored by some covenant with those pitiless gods, bearing in her eyes that primal female wisdom which is simultaneously human and inhuman, personal and impersonal. Love for her flooded my heart.
Yet did she appear, inches from my grasp, as august as an immortal and as impossible to hold.
Do you feel the city about us now? she asked. Outside the walls, the rumble of evacuees and their baggage trains could clearly be heard. It's like that morning at Astakos, isn't it? Perhaps within weeks this mighty city will be fired and razed, as our own was on that day.
I begged her to tell me how she was. Truly. She laughed.
I've changed, haven't I? Not the husband bait you always took me for. I was foolish then too; I thought as highly of my prospects. But this is not a woman's world, cousin. It never was and never will be.
From my lips blurted a course of passionate impulse. She must come with me. Now. To the hills, where we had flown once and been happy once. I would be her husband. She would be my wife.
Nothing would ever harm her again.
My sweet cousin, she replied with tender resignation, I have a husband. She indicated the letter. As you have a wife.
Her seemingly passive acceptance of fate infuriated me. What husband is he who abandons his wife? What wife is she taken without love? The gods demand of us action and the use of our free will! That is piety, not to buckle beneath necessity's yoke like dumb beasts!
This is Lord Apollo talking. My cousin smiled and touched me again with patient gentleness.
She asked if she could tell me a story. Would I listen? It was a tale she had confided to no one, save her sisters of the sanctuary and our dearest friend Bruxieus. Only a few minutes remained to us. I must be patient and attend.
Do you remember that day when the Argive soldiers shamed me? You knew I turned the hands of murder upon the issue of that violation. I aborted myself. But what you didn't know was that I hemorrhaged one night and nearly died. Bruxieus saved me as you slept. I bound him by oath never to tell you.
She regarded me with the same self-consecrated gaze I had observed upon the features of the lady Arete, that expression born of feminine wisdom which apprehends truth directly, through the blood, unobscured by the cruder faculty of reason. Like you, cousin, I hated life then. I wanted to die, and nearly did. That night in fevered sleep, feeling the blood draining from me like oil from an overturned lamp, I had a dream.
A goddess stood above me, veiled and cowled. I could see nothing but her eyes, yet so vivid was her presence that I felt certain she was real. More real than real, as if life itself were the dream and this, the dream, life in its profoundest essence. The goddess spoke no words but merely looked upon me with eyes of supreme wisdom and compassion.
My soul ached with the desire to behold her face. I was consumed with this need and implored her, in words that were not words but only the fervent appeal of my heart, to loose her veil and let me see the whole of her. I knew without thought that what would be revealed would be of supreme consequence. I was terrified and at the same time trembling with anticipation.
The goddess unbound her veil and let it fall. Will you understand, Xeo, if I say that what was revealed, the face beyond the veil, was nothing less than that reality which exists beneath the world of flesh? That higher, nobler creation which the gods know and we mortals are permitted to glimpse only in visions and transports.
Her face was beauty beyond beauty. The embodiment of truth as beauty. And it was human. So human it made the heart break with love and reverence and awe. I perceived without words that this alone was real which I beheld now, not the world we see beneath the sun. And more: that this beauty existed here, about us at every hour. Our eyes were just too blind to see it.
I understood that our role as humans was to embody here, upon this shadowed and sorrowbound side of the Veil, those qualities which arise from beyond and are the same on both sides, ever-sustaining, eternal and divine. Do you understand, Xeo? Courage, selflessness, compassion and love.
She drew up and smiled.
You think I'm loony, don't you? I've gone cracked with religion. Like a woman.
I didn't. I told her briefly of my own glimpse beyond the veil, that night within the grove of snow.
Diomache acknowledged gravely.
Did you forget your vision, Xeo? I forgot mine. I lived a life of hell here in this city. Until one day the goddess's hand guided me within these walls.
She indicated a modestly scaled but superb statue in an alcove of the court. I looked. It was a bronze of Veiled Persephone.
This, my cousin declared, is the goddess whose mystery I serve. She who passes from life to death and back again. The Kore has preserved me, as the Lord of the Bow has protected you.
She placed her hands atop mine and drew my eyes to hers.
So you see, Xeo, nothing has transpired amiss. You think you have failed to defend me. But everything you've done has defended me. As you defend me now.
She reached within the folds of her garment and produced the letter written in the lady Arete's hand.
Do you know what this is? A promise to me that your death will be honored, as you and I honored Bruxieus and we three sought to honor our parents.
The housewoman appeared again from the kitchen. Di-omache's children awaited within; my boy guide had finished his feed and stood impatient to depart. Diomache rose and held out both hands to me. The lamplight fell kindly upon her; in its gentle glow her face appeared as beautiful as it had to my eyes of love, those short years that seemed so long past. I stood too and embraced her.
She tugged the cowl atop her cropped hair and slid the veil in place across her face.
Let neither of us pity the other, my cousin spoke in parting. We are where we must be, and we will do what we must.
Suicide shook me awake two hours before dawn. Look what crawled in through the bunghole.
He was pointing to the knoll behind the Arkadian camp, where deserters from the Persian lines were being interrogated beside the watch fires. I squinted but my eyes refused to focus. Look again, he said. It's your seditious mate, Rooster. He's asking for you.
Alexandras and I went over together. It was Rooster, all right. He had crossed from the Persian lines with a party of other deserters; the Skiritai had him bound, naked, to a post. They were going to execute him; he had asked for a moment alone with me before they opened his throat.
On all sides the camp was rousing; half the army stood already on station, the other half arming.
Down the track toward Trachis you could hear the enemy trumpets, forming up for Day Two. We found Rooster next to a pair of Median informers who had talked a good-enough game that they were actually being given breakfast. Not Rooster. The Skiritai had worked him over so hard that he had to be propped up, slumped against the post where his throat would be slit.
Is that you, Xeo? He squinted through eyeholes battered purple as a boxer's.
I've brought Alexandras.
We managed to dribble some wine down Rooster's throat.
I'm sorry about your father were his first words to Alexandras. He, Rooster, had served six years as squire to Olympieus and saved his life at Oenophyta, when the The-ban cavalry had ranged down upon him. He was the noblest man of the city, not excepting Leonidas.
How can we help you? Alexandros asked.
Rooster wished to know first who else was still alive. I told him Dienekes, Polynikes and some others and recited the names of the dead whom he knew. And you're alive too, Xeo? His features twisted into a grin. Your crony Apollo must be saving you for something extraordinary.
Rooster had a simple request: that I arrange to have delivered to his wife an ancient coin of his nation, Messenia. This thumb-worn obol, he told us, he had carried in secret his whole life. He placed it into my care; I vowed to send it with the next dispatch runner. He clasped my hand in gratitude, then, lowering his voice in exigency, tugged me and Alexandros near.
Listen closely. This is what I came to tell you.
Rooster spit it out quickly. The Hellenes defending the pass had another day, no more. His Majesty even now was offering the wealth of a province to any guide who could inform him of a track through the mountains by which the Hot Gates could be encircled. God made no rock so steep that men couldn't climb it, particularly driven by gold and glory. The Persians will find a way around to your rear, and even if they don't, their fleet will break the Athenian sea line within another day. No reinforcements are coming from Sparta; the ephors know they'd only be enveloped too. And Leonidas will never pull himself or any of you out, dead or alive.
You took that beating just to deliver this news? Listen to me. When I went over to the Persians, I told them I was a helot fresh from Sparta. The King's own officers interrogated me. I was right there, two squares from Xerxes' tent. I know where the Great King sleeps and how to deliver men right to his doorstep.
Alexandros laughed out loud. You mean attack him in his tent?
When the head dies, the snake dies. Pay attention. The King's pavilion stands just beneath the cliffs at the top of the plain, right by the river, so his horses can water before the rest of the army fouls the stream. The gorge produces a torrent coming out of the mountains; the Persians think it impassable, they have less than a company on guard. A party of half a dozen could get in, in darkness, and maybe even get out.
Yes. We'll flap our wings and fly right over.
The camp had come fully awake now. At the Wall the Spartans were already massing, if so grand a term may be applied to so meager a force. Rooster told us that he had offered to guide a party of raiders into the Persian camp in return for freedom for his wife and children in Lakedaemon.
This was why the Skiritai had beaten him; they thought it a trick designed to deliver brave men into the enemy's hands for torture or worse. They won't even relay my words to their own officers. I beg you: inform someone of rank. Even without me it can work. By all the gods I swear it!
I laughed at this reborn Rooster. So you've acquired piety as well as patriotism.
The Skiritai called to us sharply. They wanted to finish Rooster and get themselves into armor.
Two rangers jerked him to his feet, to lash him upright to the post, when a clamor interrupted from the rear of the camp. We all turned and stared back down the slope.
Forty men of the Thebans had deserted during the night. A half dozen had been slain by sentries, but the others had made good their escape. All save three, who had just now been discovered, attempting to conceal themselves among the mounds of the dead.
This luckless trio was now hauled forth by a squad of Thespian sentries and dumped into the open to the rear of the Wall, smack amid the marshaling army. Blood was in the air. The Thespian Dithyrambos strode to the breach and took charge.
What punishment for these? he shouted to the encircling throng.
At this moment Dienekes appeared at Alexandros' shoulder, summoned by the commotion. I seized the instant to plead for Rooster's life, but my master made no answer, his attention held by the scene playing out below.
A dozen mortal punishments had been shouted out by the thronging warriors. Blows of homicidal intent were struck at the terrified captives; it took Dithyrambos himself, wading into the fray with his sword, to drive the men back.
The allies are possessed, Alexandros observed with dismay. Again.
Dienekes looked on coldly. I will not witness this a second time.
He strode forward, parting the mob before him, and thrust himself to the fore beside the Thespian Dithyrambos.
These dogs must receive no mercy! Dienekes stood over the bound and Hindered captives.
They must suffer the most hateful penalty imaginable, so that no other will be tempted to emulate their cowardice.
Cries of assent rose from the army. Dienekes' raised hand quelled the tumult.
You men know me. Will you accept the punishment I propose?
A thousand voices shouted aye.
Without protest? Without a quibble?
All swore to abide by Dienekes' sentence.
From the knoll behind the Wall, Leonidas and the Knights, including Polynikes, Alpheus and Maron, looked on. All sound stilled save the wind. Dienekes stepped to the kneeling captives and snatched off their blinders.
His blade cut the prisoners loose.
Bellows of outrage thundered from every quarter. Desertion in the face of the enemy was punishable by death. How many more would flee if these traitors walked off with their lives? The whole army will fall apart!
Dithyrambos, alone among the allies, seemed to divine Dienekes' subtler intent. He stepped forward beside the Spartan, his raised sword silencing the men so that Dienekes could speak.
I despise that seizure of self-preservation which unmanned these cravens last night, Dienekes addressed the thronging allies, but far more I hate that passion, comrades, which deranges you now.
He gestured to the captives on their knees before him. These men you call coward today fought shoulder-to-shoulder beside you yesterday. Perhaps with greater valor than you.
I doubt it! came a shouted cry, succeeded by waves of scorn and cries for blood pelting down upon the fugitives.
Dienekes waited for the tumult to subside. In Lakedaemon we have a name for that state of mind which holds you now, brothers. We call it 'possession.' It means that yielding to fear or anger which robs an army of order and reduces it to a rabble.
He stepped back; his sword gestured to the captives upon the ground.
Yes, these men ran last night. But what did you do? I'll tell you. Every one of you lay awake.
And what were the coven petitions of your hearts? The same as these. The blade of his xiphos indicated the pitiful wretches at his feet. Like these, you yearned for wives and children. Like these, you burned to save your own skin. Like these, you laid plans to fly and live!
Cries of denial struggled to find voice, only to sputter and fail before Dienekes' fierce gaze and the truth it embodied.
I thought those thoughts too. All night I dreamt of running. So did every officer and every Lakedaemonian here, including Leonidas.
A chastened silence held the mob.
Yes! a voice cried. But we didn't do it!
More murmurs of assent, mounting.
That's right, Dienekes spoke softly, his glance no longer lifted in address to the army but turned now, hard as flint, upon the trio of captives. We didn't do it.
He regarded the fugitives for one pitiless moment, then stepped back so the army could behold the three, bound and held at swordpoint, in their midst.
Let these men live out their days, cursed by that knowledge. Let them wake each dawn to that infamy and lie down each night with that shame. That will be their sentence of death, a living extinction far more bitter than that trifle the rest of us will bear before the sun sets tomorrow.
He stepped beyond the felons, toward that margin of the throng which led away to safety. Clear a runway!
Now the fugitives began to beg. The first, a beardless youth barely past twenty, declared that his poor farmstead lay less than half a week from here; he had feared for his new bride and infant daughter, for his infirm mother and father. The darkness had unmanned him, he confessed, but he repented now. Clasping his bound hands in supplication, he lifted his gaze toward Dienekes and the Thespian. Please, sirs, my crime was of the moment. It is passed. I will fight today and none will fault my courage.
Now the other two chimed in, both men past forty, vowing mighty oaths that they, too, would serve with honor. Dienekes stood over them. Clear a runway!
The crush of men parted to open a lane down which the trio might pass in safety out of the camp.
Anyone else? Dithyrambos' voice ascended in challenge to the army. Who else feels like a stroll? Let him take the back door now, or shut his cheesepipe from here to hell.
Surely no sight under heaven could have been more baleful or infamous, so pitiful were the postures of the wretches and the slouching increments of their gait as they passed out along the avenue of shame between the ranks of their silent comrades.
I looked down into the faces of the army. Fled was the self-serving fury which had cried in false righteousness for blood. Instead in each chastened countenance stood graven a purged and pitiless shame. The cheap and hypocritical rage which had sought to vent itself upon the runaways had been turned inward by the intervention of Dienekes. And that rage, retired within the forge of each man's secret heart, now hardened into a resolution of such blistering infamy that death itself seemed a trifle alongside it.
Dienekes turned and stalked back up the knoll. Hearing myself and Alexandras, he was intercepted by an officer of the Skiritai, who clasped his hand in both his own. That was brilliant, Dienekes. You shamed the whole army. Not one will dare budge from this dirt now.
My master's face, far from displaying satisfaction, instead stood darkened into a mask of grief.
He glanced back toward the three miscreants, slouching miserably off with their lives. Those poor bastards served their turn in the line all day yesterday. I pity them with all my heart.
The criminals had now emerged at the far end of the gauntlet of infamy. There the second man, the one who had groveled most shamelessly, turned and shouted back at the army. Fools! You're all going to die! Fuck you all, and damn you to hell!
With a cackle of doom he vanished over the brow of the slope, followed by his scampering mates, who cast glances back over their shoulders like curs.
At once Leonidas passed an order to the polemarch Derkylides, who relayed it to the officer of the watch: from here on, no sentries would be posted to the rear, no precautions taken to prevent further desertions.
With a shout the men broke up and marshaled to their ready stations.
Dienekes had now reached the compound where Alexandras and I waited with Rooster. The officer of the Skiritai was a man named Lachides, brother of the ranger called Hound.
Give this villain to me, will you, friend? Dienekes' weary gesture indicated Rooster. He's my bastard nephew. I'll slit his throat myself.
His Majesty knows far better than I the details of the intrigue by which the ultimate betrayal of the allies was effected; that is, who the traitor was of the Trachinian natives who came forward to inform His Majesty's commanders of the existence of the mountain track by which the Hot Gates could be encircled, and what reward was paid this criminal from the treasury of Persia.
The Greeks drew hints of this calamitous intelligence first from the omens taken on the morning of the second day's fighting, corroborated further by rumors and reports of deserters throughout the day, and ultimately confirmed by eyewitness testimony upon that evening, the end of the allies' sixth in possession of the pass of Thermopylae.
A nobleman of the enemy had come over to the Greek lines at the time of the changing of the first watch, approximately two hours after the cessation of the day's hostilities. He identified himself as Tyrrhastiadas of Kyme, a captain-of-a-thousand in the conscripted forces of that nation. This prince was the tallest, best-looking and most magnificently appareled personage of the enemy who had thus far deserted. He addressed the assembly in errorless Greek. His wife was a Hellene of Hallicarnassus, he declared; that, and the compulsion of honor, had impelled him to cross over to the allied lines. He informed the Spartan king that he had been present before Xerxes' pavilion this very evening when the traitor, whose name I have learned but here and evermore refuse to repeat, had come forward to claim the reward offered by His Majesty and to volunteer his services in guiding the forces of Persia along the secret track.
The noble Tyrrhastiadas went on to report that he had personally observed the issuance by His Majesty of the orders of march and the marshaling of the Persian battalions. The Immortals, their losses replaced and now numbering again their customary ten thousand, had set out at nightfall under command of their general, Hydarnes. They were on the march at this very moment, led by their traitor guide. They would be in the allied rear, in position to attack, by dawn.
His Majesty, cognizant of the catastrophic consequence for the Greeks of this betrayal, may marvel at their response in assembly to the timely and fortuitous warning delivered by the noble Tyrrhastiadas.
They didn't believe him.
They thought it was a trick.
Such an irrational and self-deluding response may be understood only in the light not alone of the exhaustion and despair which had by that hour overwhelmed the allies' hearts but by the corresponding exaltation and contempt of death, which are, like the mated faces of a coin, their obverse and concomitant.
The first day's fighting had produced acts of extraordinary valor and heroism.
The second began to spawn marvels and prodigies.
Most compelling of all was the simple fact of survival. How many times amid the manslaughter of the preceding forty-eight hours had each warrior stood upon the instant of his own extinction?
Yet still he lived. How many times had the masses of the foe in numbers overwhelming assaulted the allies with unstoppable might and valor? Yet still the front had held.
Three times on that second day the lines of the defenders teetered upon the point of buckling. His Majesty beheld the moment, immediately before nightfall, when the Wall itself stood breached and the massed myriads of the Empire clambered upon and over the stones, vaunting their victory cry. Yet somehow the Wall stood; the pass did not fall.
All day long, that second of battle, the fleets had clashed off Skiathos in mirrored reflection of the armies at the Gates. Beneath the bluffs of Artemisium the navies hammered each other, driving bronze ram against sheathed timber as their brothers contended steel against steel upon land. The defenders of the pass beheld the burning hulks, smudges against the horizon, and closer in, the flotsam of staved-in beams and spars, shivered oars and sailors' bodies facedown in the shore current. It seemed that Greek and Persian contended no longer as antagonists, but rather had entered, both sides, into some perverse pact whose aim was neither victory nor salvation, but merely to incarnadine earth and ocean with their intermingled blood. The very heavens appeared that day not as a peopled realm, assigning by their witness meaning to events below, but rather as a blank unholy face of slate, corn-passionless and indifferent. The mountain wall of Kal-lidromos overstanding the carnage seemed beyond all to embody this bereavement of pity in the featureless face of its silent stone. All creatures of the air had fled. No sign of green shoot lingered upon the earth nor within the clefts of rock.
Only the dirt itself possessed clemency. Alone the stinking soup beneath the warriors' tread proffered surcease and succor. The men's feet churned it into broth ankle-deep; their driving legs furrowed it to the depth of the calf, then they themselves fell upon it on their knees and fought from there. Fingers clawed at the blood-blackened muck, toes strained against it for purchase, the teeth of dying men bit into it as if to excavate their own graves with the clamp of their jaws.
Farmers whose hands had taken up with pleasure the dark clods of their native fields, crumbling between their fingers the rich earth which brings forth the harvest, now crawled on their bellies in this sterner soil, clawed at it with the nubs of their busted fingers and writhed without shame, seeking to immure themselves within earth's mantle and preserve their backs from the pitiless steel.
In the palaistrai of Hellas, the Greeks love to wrestle. From the time a boy can stand, he grapples with his mates, dusted with grit in pits of sand or oiled with ooze in rings of mud. Now the Hellenes wrestled in less holy precincts, where the sluice pail held not water but blood, where the prize was death and the umpire spurned all calls for stay or quarter. One witnessed again and again in the battles of the second day a Hellenic warrior fight for two hours straight, retire for ten minutes, without taking food and gulping only a cupped handful of water, then return to the fray for another two-hour round. Again and again one saw a man receive a blow that shattered the teeth within his jaw or split the bone of his shoulder yet did not make him fall.
On the second day I saw Alpheus and Maron take out six men of the foe so fast that the last two were dead before the first pair hit the ground. How many did the brothers slay that day? Fifty? A hundred? It would have taken more than an Achilles among the foe to bring them down, not solely in consequence of their strength and skill but because they were two who fought with a single heart.
All day His Majesty's champions came on, advancing in wave after wave with no interval to distinguish between nations or contingents. The rotation of forces which the allies had employed on the first day became impossible. Companies of their own will refused to forsake the line.
Squires and servants took up the arms of the fallen and assumed their places in the breach. No longer did men waste breath to cheer or rally one another to pride or valor. No more did warriors exult or vaunt their hearts in triumph. Now in the intervals of respite these simply fell, wordless and numb, into heaps of the unstrung and the undone. In the lee of the Wall, upon every hollow of sundered earth, one beheld knots of warriors shattered by fatigue and despair, eight or ten, twelve or twenty, dropped where they fell, in unmoving postures of horror and grief. None spoke or stirred. Instead the eyes of each stared without sight into inexpressible realms of private horror.
Existence had become a tunnel whose walls were death and within which prevailed no hope of rescue or deliverance. The sky had ceased to be, and the sun and stars. All that remained was the earth, the churned riven dirt which seemed to wait at each man's feet to receive his spilling guts, his shattered bones, his blood, his life. The earth coated every part of him. It was in his ears and nostrils, in his eyes and throat, under his nails and in the crease of his backside. It coated the sweat and salt of his hair; he spat it from his lungs and blew it slick with snot from his nose.
There is a secret all warriors share, so private that none dare give it voice, save only to those mates drawn dearer than brothers by the shared ordeal of arms. This is the knowledge of the hundred acts of his own cowardice. The little things that no one sees. The comrade who fell and cried for aid. Did I pass him by? Choose my skin over his? That was my crime, of which I accuse myself in the tribunal of my heart and there condemn myself as guilty.
All a man wants is to live. This before all: to cling to breath. To survive.
Yet even this most primal of instincts, self-preservation, even this necessity of the blood shared by all beneath heaven, beasts as well as man, even this may be worn down by fatigue and excess of horror. A form of courage enters the heart which is not courage but despair and not despair but exaltation. On that second day, men passed beyond themselves. Feats of heart-stopping valor fell from the sky like rain, and those who performed them could not even recall, nor state with certainty, that the actors had been themselves.
I saw a squire of the Phliasians, no more than a boy, take up his master's armor and wade into the manslaughter. Before he could strike a blow, a Persian javelin shattered his shin, driving straight through the bone. One of his mates rushed to the lad to bind his gushing artery and drag him to safety. The youth beat back his savior with the flat of his sword. He hobbled upon his spear used as a crutch, then on his knees, into the fray, still hacking at the foe from the earth where he perished.
Other squires and servants seized iron pegs and, themselves unshod and unarmored, scaled the mountain face above the Narrows, hammering the pins into cracks of rock to secure themselves, from these exposed perches hurling stones and boulders down upon the foe. The Persian archers turned these boys into pincushions; their bodies dangled crucified from pitons or tumbled from their fingerholds to crash upon the roiling slaughter below.
The merchant Elephantinos dashed into the open to save one of these lads yet living, hung up on a ledge above the rear of battle. A Persian arrow tore the old man's throat out; he fell so fast he seemed to vanish straight into the earth. Fierce fighting broke out over his corpse. Why? He was no king or officer, only a stranger who tended the young men's wounds and made them laugh with Week up to thees!
Night had nearly fallen. The Hellenes were reeling from casualties and exhaustion, while the Persians continued pouring fresh champions into the fray. Those in the foe's rear were being driven onward by the whips of their own officers; these pressed with zeal upon their fellows, driving them forward into the Greeks.
Does His Majesty remember? A violent squall had broken then over the sea; rain began sheeting in torrents. By this point most of the allies' weapons had been spent or broken. The warriors had gone through a dozen spears apiece; none yet bore his own shield, which had been staved in long since; he defended himself with the eighth and tenth he had snatched from the ground. Even the Spartans' short xiphos swords had been sundered from excess of blows. The steel blades held, but the hafts and grips had come undone. Men were fighting with stubs of iron, thrusting with shivered half-spears bereft of warhead and butt-spike.
The host of the foe had hacked their way forward, within a dozen paces of the Wall. Only the Spartans and Thespians remained before this battlement, all others of the allies having been beaten back behind or upon it. The massed myriads of the enemy extended all the way from the Narrows, flooding at will across the hundred-yard triangle before the Wall.
The Spartans fell back. I found myself beside Alexandros atop the Wall, hauling one man after another up and over, while the allies rained javelins and shivered spears, stones and boulders and even helmets and shields down upon the onpressing foe.
The allies cracked and reeled. Back they fell in a disordered mass, fifty feet, a hundred, beyond the Wall. Even the Spartans withdrew in disorder, my master, Polynikes, Al-pheus and Maron themselves, shattered by wounds and exhaustion.
The enemy literally tore the stones from the face of the Wall. Now the tide of their multitude flooded over the toppled ruins, skidding down the stadium steps of the Wall's rear onto the open earth before the unprotected camps of the allies. Vanquishment was moments away when for cause inexplicable, the foe, with victory before him in his palm, pulled up in fear and could not find courage to press home the kill.
The enemy drew up, seized by a terror without source or signature.
What force had unmanned their hearts and robbed them of valor, no faculty of reason may divine. It may have been that the warriors of the Empire could not credit the imminence of their own triumph. Perhaps they had been fighting for so long on the foreside of the Wall that their senses could not embrace the reality of at last achieving the breach.
Whatever it was, the foe's momentum faltered. A moment of unearthly stillness seized the field.
Suddenly from the heavens a bellow of unearthly power, as that from the throats of fifty thousand men, pealed through the aether. The hair stood straight up on my neck; I spun toward Alexandros; he, too, held rooted, paralyzed in awe and terror, as every other man upon the field.
A bolt of almighty magnitude slammed overhead into the wall of Kallidromos. Thunder boomed, great stones blew from the cliff face; smoke and sulphur rent the air. On rolled that unearthly cry, nailing all in place with terror save Leonidas, who now strode to the fore with upraised spear.
Zeus Savior! the king's voice rose into the thunder. Hellas and freedom!
He cried the paean and rushed forward upon the foe. Fresh courage flooded the allies' hearts; they roared into the counterattack. Back over the Wall the enemy tumbled in panic at this prodigy of heaven. I found myself again atop its slick and sundered stones, firing shaft after shaft into the mass of Persians and Bactrians, Medes and Illyrians, Lydians and Egyptians, stampeding in flight below.
The ghastliness of the carnage that followed, His Majesty's own eyes may testify to. As the foreranks of the Persians fled in terror, the whips of their rearmen drove their reinforcing fellows forward. As when two waves, one crashing shoreward before the storm, the other returning seaward down the steep slope of the strand, collide and annihilate one another in spray and foam, so did the crash and wheel of the Empire's armies turn force upon force to trample by thousands those trapped within the riptide of its vortex.
Leonidas had earlier called upon the allies to build a second wall, a wall of Persian bodies.
Precisely this now eventuated. The foe fell in such numbers that no warrior of the allies planted sole upon the earth. One trod upon bodies. On bodies atop bodies. Ahead the Hellenic warriors could see the enemy stampeding into the whips of their own rearmen, charging them, slaying with spear and sword their own fellows in blood madness to escape. Scores and hundreds toppled into the sea. I saw the Spartan front ranks literally scaling the wall of Persian bodies, needing assistance from the second-rankers just to propel themselves over.
Suddenly the piled mass of the dead gave way. An ava-lanche of bodies began. In the Narrows the allies scrambled rearward toward safety atop a landslide of corpses, which fed upon itself, gaining momentum from its own weight as it tumbled with enrolling might upon the Persians, back down the track toward Trachis. So grotesque was this sight that the Hellenic warriors, unordered by command, but of their own instinct, pulled up where they stood and discontinued the press of their advance, looking on in awe as the enemy perished in numbers uncountable, swallowed and effaced beneath this grisly avalanche of flesh.
Now, in the night assembly of the allies, this prodigy was recalled and cited as evidence of the intercession of the gods. The nobleman Tyrrhastiadas stood beside Leonidas, before the assembled Greeks, urging them with what was clearly the passionate beneficence of his heart to retreat, withdraw, get out. The noble repeated his report of the ten thousand Immortals, even now advancing upon the mountain track to encircle the allies. Less than a thousand Hellenes remained still capable of resistance. What could these hope to effect against ten times their number striking from the undefended rear, while a thousand times their total compounded the assault from the fore?
Yet such was the exaltation produced by that final prodigy that the allies would neither listen nor pay heed. Men came forward in assembly, skeptics and agnostics, those who acknowledged their doubt and even disdain of the gods; these same men now swore mighty oaths and declared that this bolt of heaven and the unearthly bellow which had accompanied it had been none other than the war cry of Zeus Himself.
More heartening news had come in from the fleet. A storm, unseasonably spawned this prior night, had wrecked two hundred of the enemy's warships on the far shore of Euboea. One fifth of His Majesty's navy, the Athenian corvette captain Habroniches reported with exultation, had been lost with all hands; he had beheld the wreckage this day with his own eyes. Might not this, too, be the work of God?
Leontiades, the Theban commander, stepped forward, seconding and inflaming the derangement.
What force of man, he demanded, may stand up before the rage of heaven? Bear this in mind, brothers and allies, that nine-tenths of the Persian's army are conscripted nations, drafted against their will at the point of a sword. How will Xerxes continue to hold them in line? Like cattle as today, driven onward with whips? Believe me, men, the Persian's allies are cracking. Discontent and disaffection are spreading like pestilence through their camp; desertion and mutiny He one more defeat away. If we can hold tomorrow, brothers, Xerxes' predicament will compel him to force the issue at sea. Poseidon who shakes the earth has already wreaked havoc once upon the Persian's pride. Perhaps the god may cut him down to size again.
The Greeks, inflamed by the Theban commander's passion, hurled harsh words at the Kymean Tyrrhastiadas. The allies swore it was not they who stood now in peril, but Xerxes himself and his overweening pride which had called forth the wrath of the Almighty.
I did not need to glance to my master to read his heart. This derangement of the allies was katalepsis, possession. It was madness, as surely the speakers themselves knew even as they spewed their grief- and horror-spawned rage at the convenient target of the Kymean noble. The prince himself bore this abuse in silence, sorrow darkening his already grave features.
Leonidas dismissed the assembly, instructing each contingent to turn its attention to the repair and refitting of weapons. He dispatched the Athenian captain, Habroniches, back to the fleet, with orders to inform the naval commanders Eurybiades and Themistokles of all he had heard and seen here tonight.
The allies dispersed, leaving only the Spartans and the nobleman Tyrrhastiadas beside the commander's fire.
A most impressive testimony of faith, my lord, the prince spoke after some moments. Such devout orations cannot fail to sustain your men's courage. For an hour. Until darkness and fatigue efface the passion of the moment, and fear for themselves and their families resurfaces, as it must, within their hearts.
The noble repeated with emphasis his report of the mountain track and the Ten Thousand. He declared that if the hand of the gods was at all present in this day's events, it was not their benevolence seeking to preserve the Hellenic defenders but their perverse and unknowable will acting to detach them from their reason. Surely a commander of Leonidas' sagacity perceived this, as clearly as he, lifting his glance to the cliff of Kallidromos, could behold there upon the rock the scores of lightning scars where over decades and centuries numerous other random bolts had in the natural course of coastal storms struck here upon this, the loftiest and most proximate promontory.
Tyrrhastiadas again pressed Leonidas and the officers to credit his report. The demos in assembly may elect to disbelieve him; they may denounce and even execute him as a spy; their reason may deceive itself and embrace a propitious prospect for the morrow. Their king and commander, however, cannot permit himself such luxury.
Say, the Persian pressed, that I am an agent of intrigue. Believe I have been sent by Xerxes.
Say that my intention is in his interest, to influence you by guile and artifice to quit the pass. Say and believe all this. Yet still my report is true. The Immortals are coming.
They will appear by morning, ten thousand strong, in the allied rear.
With a step the noble moved before the Spartan king, addressing him with passion, man-to-man.
This struggle at the Hot Gates will not be the decisive one, my lord. That battle will come later, deeper into Greece, perhaps before the walls of Athens, perhaps at the Isthmus, perhaps within the Peloponnese, beneath the peaks of Sparta herself. You know this. Any commander who can read terrain and topography knows it.
Your nation needs you, sir. You are the soul of her army. You may say that a king of Lakedaemon never retreats. But valor must be tempered with wisdom or it is merely recklessness.
Consider what you and your men have accomplished at the Hot Gates already. The fame you have won in these six days will live forever. Do not seek death for death's sake, nor to fulfill a vain prophecy. Live, sir, and fight another day. Another day with your whole army at your back.
Another day when victory, decisive victory, may be yours.
The Persian gestured to the Spartan officers clustered in the light of the council fire. The polemarch Derkylides, the Knights Polynikes and Doreion, the platoon commanders and the warriors, Alpheus and Maron and my master. I beg you, sir. Conserve these, the flower of Lakedaemon, to give their lives another day. Spare yourself for that hour.
You have proved your valor, my lord. Now, I beseech you, demonstrate your wisdom.
Withdraw now.
Get yourself and your men out while you still can.