Gates of Fire (18 page)

“I would like to have known your mother,” the lady Arete said, regarding me with kindness. “Perhaps she and I will meet someday, beyond the river. We will speak of her son, and the unhappy portion the gods have set out before him.”

She touched me once upon the shoulder in dismissal.

“Go now, and tell your friend this: he may come again with his questions, if he wishes. But next time he must come in person. I wish to look upon the face of this boy who has sat and chatted with the Son of Heaven.”

FOURTEEN

A
lexandros and I received our whippings for Antirhion the following evening. His was administered by his father, Olympieus, before the Peers of that officer's mess; I was lashed without ceremony in the fields by a helot groundsman. Rooster helped me away afterward, alone in the darkness, down to a grove called the Anvil beside the Eurotas to bathe and dress my stripes. This was a spot sacred to Demeter of the Fields and segregated by custom to the use of Messenian helots; there had once been a smithy upon the site, hence the name.

To my relief Rooster did not treat me to his customary harangue about the life of a slave, but rather limited his diatribe to the observation that Alexandros had been whipped like a boy and I like a dog. He was kind to me and, more important, possessed expertise in cleansing and dressing that unique species of ruptured laceration which is produced by the impact of the knurled birch upon the naked flesh of the back.

First water and plenty of it, bodily immersion to the neck in the icy current. Rooster supported me from behind, elbows braced beneath my armpits, since the shock of the frigid water upon the opened weals rarely fails to knock one faint. The cold numbs the flesh swiftly, and a wash of boiled nettles and Nessos' wort may be applied and endured. This stanches the flow of blood and promotes the rapid resealing of the flesh. A dressing of wool or linen at this stage would be unendurable, even applied with the gentlest touch. But a friend's bare palm, placed lightly at first, then pressed hard into the quivering flesh and held down, brings a relief whose effects approach ecstasy. Rooster had endured his own share of thrashings and knew the drill well.

Within five minutes I could stand. In fifteen my skin could take the soft sphagnum, which Rooster pressed into the blotted mass to suck out the poison and to inject its own subtle anesthetic. “By God, there's not a virgin left,” he observed, meaning a space that was still God's flesh and not ruptured and reruptured scar tissue. “You won't be humping that hymn-singer's shield across this back for a month.”

He was just launching into another venomous denunciation of my boy-master when a rustle came from the bank above us. We both wheeled, ready for anything.

It was Alexandros. He stepped into view beneath the plane trees, his cloak furled forward, leaving his own throttled back bare. Rooster and I froze. Alexandros would buy himself a second whipping if he was found here at this hour, and us with him.

“Here,” he said, skidding down the bank to join us, “I picked the surgeon's locker for this.”

It was wax of myrrh. Two fingers' worth, wrapped in green rowan leaves. He stepped into the stream beside us.

“What have you got there on his back?” he demanded of Rooster, who stepped aside with a look of blank astonishment. Myrrh was what the Peers used on wounds of battle when they could get it, which they rarely could. They would beat Alexandros half to death if they knew he'd purloined this precious portion. “Get it on him later when you peel off the moss,” Alexandros directed Rooster. “Wash it off good by dawn. If anyone smells it, it'll be all our backs and more.”

He placed the wrapped leaves in Rooster's hands.

“I have to be back before count,” Alexandros declared. In an instant he had melted away up the bank; we could hear his footfalls vanishing softly as he sprinted in shadow back toward the boys' stations around the Square.

“Well, bend me over and root me senseless,” Rooster spoke, shaking his head. “That little lark's got bigger globes than I thought.”

At dawn when we fell in before sacrifice, Rooster and I were called out from our places by Suicide, Dienekes' Scythian squire. We were white with dread. Someone had peeped on us; there would be hell to pay for sure.

“You little turdnuggets must be floating under a lucky star” was all Suicide said. He conducted us to the rear of the formation. Dienekes stood there, silent, alone in the predawn shadows. We took our stations of deference on his left, his shield side. The pipers sounded; the formation moved off. Dienekes indicated that Rooster and I were to stay put.

He held stationary before us. Suicide stood on his right, with the quiver of sawed-off javelins he called “darning needles” angled nonchalantly across his back.

“I've been examining your record,” Dienekes addressed me, his first words, other than the summons two nights previous to follow the serving boy to his home, ever spoken directly to me. “The helots tell me you're worthless as a field hand. I've watched you in the sacrificial train; you can't even shave the throat of a goat correctly. And it's clear from your conduct with Alexandros that you'll follow any order, no matter how mindless or absurd.” He motioned me to turn, so he could examine my back. “It seems the only talent you possess is you're a fast healer.”

He bent and sniffed my back. “If I didn't know better,” he observed, “I'd swear these stripes had been waxed with myrrh.”

Suicide kicked me around, back to face Dienekes. “You're an unwholesome influence on Alexandros,” the Peer addressed me. “A boy doesn't need another boy, and certainly not a trouble collector like you; he needs a mature man, someone with the authority to stop him when he gets some reckless stunt into his head like tracking after the army. So I'm giving him my own man.” His nod indicated Suicide. “I'm sacking you,” he told me. “You're through.”

Oh hell. Back to the shitfields.

Dienekes turned next to Rooster. “And you. The son of a Spartiate hero and you can't even hold a sacrificial cock in your fists without strangling it. You're pathetic. You've got a mouth looser than a Corinthian's asshole and it broadcasts treason every time it yawns. I'd be doing you a favor to slit your cheesepipe right here and save the
krypteia
the trouble.”

He reminded Rooster of Meriones, the squire of Olympieus who had fallen so gallantly last week at Antirhion. Neither of us boys had any idea where this was going.

“Olympieus is past fifty, he possesses all the prudence and circumspection he needs. His next squire should balance him with youth. Somebody green and strong and reckless.” He regarded Rooster with wry scorn. “God knows what folly has inspired him, but Olympieus has picked you. You will take Meriones' place. You will attend Olympieus. Report to him at once. You're his first squire now.”

I could see Rooster blinking. This must be a trick.

“It's no joke,” Dienekes said, “and you'd better not make it one. You're treading in the steps of a man better than half the Peers in the regiment. Screw it up and I'll spit you over the flame personally.”

“I won't, lord.”

Dienekes studied him a long, hard moment. “Shut up and get the fuck out of here.”

Rooster took off after the formation at a run. I confess I was ill with envy. The first squire of a Peer, and not just that, but a
polemarch
and king's tent companion. I hated Rooster for his dumb blind luck.

Or was it? As I blanched, numb with jealousy, a picture of the lady Arete shot across the eye of my mind. She was behind this. I felt even worse and regretted bitterly that I had confided to her my vision of Apollo Far Striker.

“Let me see your back,” Dienekes commanded. I turned again; he whistled appreciatively. “By God, if there were an Olympic event in back-striping, you'd be the betting man's favorite.” He had me face about and stand at attention before him; he regarded me thoughtfully, his gaze seeming to pierce straight through to my spine. “The qualities of a good battle squire are simple enough. He must be dumb as a mule, numb as a post and obedient as an imbecile. In these qualifications, Xeones of Astakos, I declare your credentials impeccable.”

Suicide was chuckling darkly. He tugged something from behind the quiver at his back. “Go ahead, take a look,” Dienekes ordered. I raised my eyes.

In the Scythian's hand stood a bow. My bow.

Dienekes commanded me to take it.

“You're not strong enough yet to be my first squire, but if you can manage to keep your head out of your ass, you might make a half-respectable second.” Into my palm Suicide placed the bow, the big Thessalian cavalry weapon that had been confiscated from me at twelve, when first I crossed the frontier into Lakedaemon.

I could not stop my hands from trembling; I felt the warm ash of the bow and the living current that coursed its length and up into my palms.

“You'll pack my rations, bedding and medical kit,” Dienekes instructed me. “You'll cook for the other squires and hunt for my pot, on exercises in Lakedaemon and beyond the border on campaign. Do you accept this?”

“I do, lord.”

“At home you may hunt hares and keep them for yourself, but don't flaunt your good fortune.”

“I won't, lord.”

He regarded me with that look of wry amusement I had observed on his face before, at a distance, and which I would come to see many times more close-up.

“Who knows,” my new master said, “with luck, you might even get in a potshot at the enemy.”

FIFTEEN

T
he army of Lakedaemon marched out in twenty-one different campaigns over the next five years, all in actions against other Hellenes. That pitch of enmity which Leonidas had sought since Antirhion to maintain focused upon the Persian now found itself of necessity directed against more immediate targets, those cities of Greece which tilted perfidiously toward playing the traitor, allying themselves in advance with the invader, to save their own skins.

Mighty Thebes, whose exiled aristocrats conspired ceaselessly with the Persian court, seeking to reclaim preeminence in their country by selling it out to the foe.

Jealous Argos, Sparta's most bitter and proximate rival, whose nobles treated openly with the agents of the Empire. Macedonia under Alexander had long since offered tokens of submission. Athens, too, had exiled aristocrats reclining within the Persian pavilions while they plotted for their own restoration as lords beneath the Persian pennant.

Sparta herself stood not immune from treason, for her deposed king, Demaratos, as well had taken up the exile's station among the sycophants surrounding His Majesty. What else could Demaratos' desire be, save reaccession to power in Lakedaemon as satrap and magistrate of the Lord of the East?

In the third year after Antirhion, Darius of Persia died. When news of this reached Greece, hope rekindled in the free cities. Perhaps now the Persian would abort his mobilization. With her King dead, would not the army of the Empire disband? Would not the Persian vow to conquer Hellas be set aside?

Then you, Your Majesty, acceded to the throne.

The army of the foe did not disband.

Her fleet did not disperse.

Instead the Empire's mobilization redoubled. The zeal of a prince freshly crowned burned within His Majesty's breast. Xerxes son of Darius would not be judged by history inferior to his father, nor to his illustrious forebears Cambyses and Cyrus the Great. These, who had vanquished and enslaved all Asia, would be joined in the pantheon of glory by Xerxes, their scion, who would now add Greece and Europe to the roll of provinces of the Empire.

Across all Hellas,
phobos
advanced like a sapper's tunnel. One smelled the dust of its excavation in the still of morning and felt its yard-by-yard advance rumbling beneath one in his sleep. Of all the mighty cities of Greece, only Sparta, Athens and Corinth held fast. These dispatched legation after legation to the wavering
poleis,
seeking to bind them to the Alliance. My own master was assigned in a single season to five separate overseas embassies. I puked over so many different ships' rails I couldn't recall one from the other.

Everywhere these embassies touched,
phobos
had called first. The Fear made people reckless. Many were selling all they owned; others, more heedless, were buying. “Let Xerxes spare his sword and send his purse instead,” my master observed in disgust after yet another embassy had been rebuffed. “The Greeks will trample one another's bones, racing to see who first can sell his freedom.”

Always upon these legations, a part of my mind kept alert for word of my cousin. Three times in my seventeenth year the service of my master brought me through the city of the Athenians; each time I inquired after the location of the home of the gentlewoman whom Diomache and I had encountered that morning on the road to the Three Corners, when that fine lady had ordered Dio to seek her town estate and take service there. I secured at last the quarter and street but never succeeded in finding the house.

Once at a salon in the Athenian Akademe a lovely bride of twenty appeared, mistress of the household, and for a moment I was certain it was Diomache. My heart began to pound so violently that I must kneel upon one knee for fear of dropping to the floor dead faint. But the lady was not she. Nor was the bride glimpsed a year later bearing water from a spring in Naxos. Nor the physician's wife encountered under cloister in Histiaea six months thereafter.

Upon one blistering summer evening, two years before the battle at the Gates, the ship bearing my master's legation touched briefly at Phaleron, a port of Athens. Our mission completed, we had two hours before tide's turn. I was granted leave and on the run at last located the house of the family of the lady of the Three Corners. The place was shuttered;
phobos
had driven the clan forth to landholdings in Iapygia, or so I was informed by a loitering squad of Scythian archers, those thugs whom the Athenians employ as city constabulary. Yes, the brutes remembered Diomache. Who could forget her? They took me for another of her suitors and spoke in the crude language of the street.

“The bird winged off,” one said. “Too wild for the cage.”

Another declared he had encountered her since, in the market with a husband, a citizen and sea officer. “The fool bitch,” he laughed. “To knot with that salt-sucker, when she could have had me!”

Returning to Lakedaemon, I resolved to root this folly of longing from my heart, as a farmer burns out a stubborn stump. I told Rooster it was time I took a bride. He found one for me, his cousin Thereia, the daughter of his mother's sister. I was eighteen, she fifteen when we were joined in the Messenian fashion practiced by the helots. She bore a son within ten months and a daughter while I was away on campaign.

A husband now, I vowed to think no more of my cousin. I would eradicate my own impiety and dwell no longer upon fancies.

The years had passed swiftly. Alexandros completed his service as a youth of the
agoge;
he was given his war shield and assumed his station among the Peers of the army. He took to wife the maiden Agathe, just as he had promised. She bore him twins, a boy and girl, before he was twenty.

Polynikes was crowned at Olympia for the second time, victor again in the sprint in armor. His wife, Altheia, bore him a third son.

The lady Arete produced for Dienekes no more children; she had come up barren after four daughters, without producing a male heir.

Rooster's wife, Harmonia, bore a second child, a boy whom he named Messenieus. The lady Arete attended the birth, providing her own midwife and assisting at the delivery with her own hands. I myself bore the torch that escorted her home. She would not speak, so torn was she between the joy of witnessing at last from her line the birth of a male, a defender for Lakedaemon, and the sorrow of knowing that this boy-child, issue of her brother's bastard, Rooster, with all his treasonous defiance of his Spartan masters, right down to the name he had chosen for his son, would face the sternest and most perilous passage to manhood.

The Persian myriads stood now in Europe. They had bridged the Hellespont and traversed all of Thrace. Still the Hellenic allies wrangled. A force of ten thousand heavy infantry, commanded by the Spartan Euanetus, was dispatched to Tempe in Thessaly, there to make a stand against the invader at the northernmost frontier of Greece. But the site, when the army got there, proved undefendable. The position could be turned by land via the pass at Gonnus and outflanked by sea through Aulis. In disgrace and mortification the force of Ten Thousand pulled out and dispersed to its constituent cities.

A desperate paralysis possessed the Congress of the Greeks. Thessaly, abandoned, had gone over to the Persian, adding her matchless cavalry to swell the squadrons of the foe. Thebes teetered at the brink of submission. Argos was sitting it out. Dread omens and prodigies abounded. The Oracle of Apollo at Delphi had counseled the Athenians,

“Fly to the ends of the earth,”

while the Spartan Council of Elders, notoriously slow to action, yet dithered and dawdled. A stand must be made somewhere. But where?

In the end it was their women who galvanized the Spartans into action. It came about like this.

Refugees, many brides with babes, were flooding into the last of the free cities. Young mothers took flight to Lakedaemon, islanders and relations fleeing the Persian advance across the Aegean. These brides inflamed their listeners' hatred of the foe with tales of the conquerors' atrocities in their earlier passage through the islands: how the enemy at Chios and Lesbos and Tenedos had formed dragnets at one end of the territory and advanced across each island, scouring out every hiding place, hauling forth the young boys, herding the handsomest together and castrating them for eunuchs, killing every man and raping the women, selling them forth into foreign slavery. The babies' heads these heroes of Persia dashed against the walls, splattering their brains upon the paving stones.

The wives of Sparta listened with icy fury to these tales, cradling their own infants at their breasts. The Persian hordes had swept now through Thrace and Macedonia. The baby-murderers stood upon the doorstep of Greece, and where was Sparta and her warrior defenders? Blundering homeward unblooded from the fool's errand of Tempe.

I had never seen the city in such a state as in the aftermath of that debacle. Heroes with prizes of valor skulked about, countenances downcast with shame, while their women snapped at them with scorn and held themselves aloof and disdainful. How could Tempe have happened? Any battle, even a defeat, would have been preferable to none at all. To marshal such a magnificent force, garland it before the gods, transport it all that way and not draw blood, even one's own, this was not merely disgraceful but, the wives declared, blasphemous.

The women's scorn excoriated the city. A delegation of wives and mothers presented itself to the ephors, insisting that they themselves be sent out next time, armed with hairpins and distaffs, since surely the women of Sparta could disgrace themselves no more egregiously nor accomplish less than the vaunted Ten Thousand.

In the warriors' messes the mood was even more corrosive. How much longer would the Allied Congress dither? How many more weeks would the ephors delay?

I recall vividly the morning when at last the proclamation came. The Herakles regiment trained that day in a dry watercourse called the Corridor, a blistering funnel between sand banks north of the village of Limnai. The men were running impact drills, two-on-ones and three-on-twos, when a distinguished elder named Charilaus, who had been an ephor and a priest of Apollo but now functioned primarily as a senior counselor and emissary, appeared on the crest of the bank and spoke aside to the
polemarch
Derkylides, the regimental commander. The old man was past seventy; he had lost the lower half of a leg in battle years past. For him to have hobbled on his staff this far from the city could only mean something big had happened.

The patriarch and the
polemarch
spoke in private. The drills went on. No one looked up, yet every man knew.

This was it.

Dienekes' men got the word from Laterides, commander of the adjacent platoon, who passed it down the line.

“It's the Gates, lads.”

The Hot Gates.

Thermopylae.

No assembly was called. To the astonishment of all, the regiment was dismissed. The men were given the whole rest of the day off.

Such a holiday had only been granted half a dozen times in my memory; invariably the Peers broke up in high spirits and made for home at the trot. This time no one budged. The entire regiment stood nailed to the site, in the sweltering confines of the dry river, buzzing like a hive.

Here was the word:

Four
morai,
five thousand men, would be mobilized for Thermopylae. The column, reinforced by four
perioikic
regiments and packing squires and armed helots two to a man, would march out as soon as the Karneia, the festival of Apollo which prohibited taking up arms, expired. Two and half weeks.

The force would total twenty thousand men, twice the number at Tempe, concentrated in a pass ten times narrower.

Another thirty to fifty thousand allied infantry would be mobilized behind this initial force, while a main force of the allied navy, a hundred and twenty ships of war, would seal the straits at Artemisium and Andros and the narrows of the Euripus, protecting the army at the Gates from flank assault by sea.

This was a massive call-up. So massive it smelled. Dienekes knew it and so did everyone else.

My master humped back to the city accompanied by Alexandros, now a full line warrior of the platoon, his mates Bias, Black Leon and their squires. A third of the way along we overtook the elder Charilaus, shambling home with painful slowness, supported by his attendant, Sthenisthes, who was as ancient as he. Black Leon led an ass of the train on a halter; he insisted the old man ride. Charilaus declined but permitted the place to his servant.

“Cut through the shit for us, will you, old uncle?” Dienekes addressed the statesman affectionately but with a soldier's impatience for the truth.

“I relay only what I'm instructed, Dienekes.”

“The Gates won't hold fifty thousand. They won't hold five.”

A wry expression wizened the old-timer's face. “I see you fancy your generalship superior to Leonidas'.”

One fact was self-evident even to us squires. The Persian army stood now in Thessaly. That was what, ten days to the Gates? Less? In two and a half weeks their millions would sweep through and be eighty miles beyond. They'd be parked upon our threshold.

“How many in the advance party?” Black Leon inquired of the elder.

He meant the forward force of Spartans that would, as always in advance of a mobilization, be dispatched to Thermopylae now, at once, to take possession of the pass before the Persians got there and before the main force of the allied army moved up.

“You'll hear it from Leonidas tomorrow,” the old man replied. But he saw the younger men's frustration.

“Three hundred,” he volunteered. “All Peers. All sires.”

My master had a way of setting his jaw, a fierce clamping action of the teeth, which he employed when he was wounded on campaign and didn't want his men to know how bad. I looked. This expression stood now upon his face.

An “all-sire” unit was comprised only of men who were fathers of living sons.