Gates of Fire (21 page)

“Then, and only then, may His Majesty with honor take ship and return home.”

The warrior queen finished and resumed her position upon her couch. Mardonius offered no rebuttal. His Majesty looked from one to the other.

“It seems my women have become men, and my men women.”

His Majesty spoke not in rancor or disapprobation, but stretching His right hand across, He settled it with affection upon the shoulder of His friend and kinsman Mardonius, as if to reassure the general that His confidence in him remained steadfast and undiminished.

His Majesty then straightened and with forcefulness of voice and demeanor reassumed His kingly tone.

“Tomorrow,” He vowed, “we will burn Athens to the ground and, following that, march upon the Peloponnese, there to overthrow the very foundation stones of Sparta, not ceasing until we have ground them, everlastingly, into dust.”

NINETEEN

H
is Majesty did not sleep that night. Instead He ordered the Greek Xeones summoned to Him at once, intending even at this advanced hour to interrogate the man personally, seeking further intelligence of the Spartans, who now, more so even than the Athenians, had become the focus of His Majesty's fever and obsession. The warrioress Artemisia had along with Mardonius been dismissed and was at that moment taking her leave; upon hearing these orders of His Majesty she turned back and spoke with concern for Him.

“Sire, please, for the sake of the army and of those who love you, I beg you preserve the Royal Person, for godly though Your Majesty's spirit may be, yet it is contained within a mortal vessel. Get some sleep. Do not torment yourself with these cares, which are mere phantoms.”

The general Mardonius seconded this with vehemence. “Why distress yourself, Lord, with this tale told by a slave? What bearing can the story of obscure officers and their petty internecine wars have upon the events of supreme moment to which we now are committed? Trouble yourself no more with this whimsy woven by a savage, who hates you and Persia with every element of his being. His story is all lies anyway, if you ask me.”

His Majesty smiled at these words of his general. “On the contrary, my friend, I believe this fellow's tale is true in every regard and, though you may not yet grant it, very much to the point of matters with which we now grapple.”

His Majesty indicated His campaign throne, which stood in the lamplight beneath the pinnacle of the tent. “Do you see that chair, my friends? No mortal can be lonelier or more isolated than He who sits upon it. You cannot appreciate this, Mardonius. None can who has not sat there.

“Consider: Whom can a king trust who comes into His hearing? What man enters before Him but with some secret desire, passion, grievance or
claim, which he employs all his artifice and guile to conceal? Who speaks the truth before a king? A man addresses Him either in fear for that which He may seize or in avarice for that which He may bestow. None comes before Him but as a suppliant. His heart's business the flatterer speaks not aloud, but all he obscures beneath the cloak of dissemblance and dissimulation.

“Each voice vowing allegiance, each heart declaring love, the Royal Listener must probe and examine as if He were a vendor in a bazaar, seeking the subtle indices of betrayal and deceit. How tiresome this becomes. A king's own wives whisper sweetly to Him in the darkness of the royal bedchamber. Do they love Him? How can He know, when He perceives their true passion spent in scheming and intriguing for their children's advantage or their own private gain. None speaks the truth whole to a king, not His own brother, not even you, my friend and kinsman.”

Mardonius hastened to deny this, but His Majesty cut him short with a smile. “Of all those who come before me, only one man, I believe, speaks without desire for private profit. That is this Greek. You do not understand him, Mardonius. His heart yearns for one thing only: to be reunited with his brothers-in-arms beneath the earth. Even his passion to tell their story is secondary, an obligation imposed upon him by one of his gods, which is to him a burden and a curse. He seeks nothing from me. No, my friends, the Greek's words do not trouble or distress. They please. They restore.”

His Majesty, standing then at the threshold of the pavilion, gestured past the guard of the Immortals to the watch fires glowing without.

“Consider the crossing at which we now stand encamped, that site the Hellenes call the Three-Cornered Way. It would be nothing to us, mere dirt beneath our feet. Yet is not this humble plot given meaning, and even charm, to recall from the prisoner's tale that he, as a child, parted here from the maiden Diomache, his cousin whom he loved?”

Artemisia exchanged a glance with Mardonius.

“His Majesty yields to sentiment,” the lady addressed her King, “and fatuous sentiment at that.”

At this moment the service portal of the pavilion parted and permission to enter was asked by the detention officers. The Greek was borne in, yet upon his litter, eyes cloth-bound as ever, by two subalterns of the Immortals preceded by Orontes, their captain.

“Let us see the man's face,” His Majesty commanded, “and may his eyes behold ours.”

Orontes obeyed. The cloth was removed.

The captive Xeones blinked several times in the lamplight, then looked for the first time upon His Majesty. So striking was the expression which then appeared upon the man's face that the captain remarked angrily upon it and demanded to know what arrogance possessed the fellow to stare so boldly at the Royal Person.

“I have looked upon His Majesty's face before,” the man replied.

“Above the battle, as all the foe have.”

“No, Captain. Here, in this tent. On the night of the fifth day.”

“You are a liar!” Orontes struck the man in anger. For the breach to which the captive referred had in fact occurred, on the penultimate eve of battle at the Hot Gates, when a night raid of the Spartans bore a handful of their warriors within a spear's thrust of the Royal Presence, inside this very pavilion, before the intruders were driven back by the Immortals and Egyptian marines swarming to His Majesty's defense.

“I was here,” the Greek responded calmly, “and would have had my skull split apart by an axe, hurled at me by a noble, had it not struck first a ridgepole of the tent and embedded itself there.”

At this, the general Mardonius' face lost all color. In the west portal of the chamber, precisely where the Spartan raid had penetrated, was lodged yet an axehead, driven so deep into the cedar that it could not be extracted without splitting the pole, and so had been left in place by the carpenters, sawn off at the shaft, with the pole repaired and rewound about it with cord.

The Hellene's gaze now centered directly upon Mardonius. “This lord here threw that axe. I recognize his face as well.”

The general's expression, for the moment struck dumb, betrayed the truth of this.

“His sword,” the Greek continued, “severed the wrist of a Spartiate warrior, at the moment of drawing back his spear to thrust at His Majesty.”

His Majesty inquired of Mardonius if this indeed was true. The general confirmed that he had in fact inflicted such a wound upon an advancing
Spartan, among numerous others delivered in those moments of confusion and peril.

“That warrior,” the man Xeones declared, “was Alexandros, the son of Olympieus, of whom I spoke.”

“The boy who followed the Spartan army? Who swam the channel before Antirhion?” Artemisia asked.

“Grown to manhood,” the Greek confirmed. “Those officers who bore him from this tent protected by the shadows of their shields, those were the Knight Polynikes and my master, Dienekes.”

All paused for several moments, absorbing this.

His Majesty spoke: “These truly were the men who penetrated here, into this tent?”

“They and others, Lord. As His Majesty saw.”

The general Mardonius received this intelligence with skepticism bordering on outrage. He accused the prisoner of fabricating this tale from snatches he had overheard from the cooks or medical personnel who attended him. The captive denied this respectfully but with vehemence.

Orontes, responding to Mardonius in his capacity as Commander of the Guard, proclaimed it inconceivable that the Greek could have acquired knowledge of these events in the manner the general suggested. The captain himself had personally overseen the prisoner's sequestration. No one, either of the commissariat or of the Royal Surgeon's staff, had been allowed alone with the man, even for a moment, without the immediate supervision of His Majesty's Immortals, and these were, as all knew, without peer in scruple and attendance.

“Then he has this tale from the rumor mill of the battle,” Mardonius rejoined, “from the Spartan warriors who did in fact breach His Majesty's line.”

All attention now swung to the captive Xeones, who, quite undistressed by these accusations which could have produced his death upon the spot, regarded Mardonius with level gaze and addressed him without fear.

“I might have learned of these events, lord, in the manner which you suggest. But how, sir, would I know to recognize you, of all these others, as the man who hurled the axe?”

His Majesty had now crossed to the spot where the axehead was embed
ded and with His dagger cut through the enwrapping cord to expose the weapon. Upon the steel of the axehead, His Majesty identified the double-headed griffin of Ephesus, whose corps of armorers' privilege it was to provide all edged blades and lances for Mardonius and his commanders.

“Tell me now,” His Majesty addressed the general, “that no god's hand is at work here.”

His Majesty declared that He and His counselors had already from the captive's tale gleaned much that was as instructive as it was unanticipated. “How much more of value may we yet learn?”

With a gesture of warmth, His Majesty motioned the man Xeones closer to Him and had the fellow's still gravely ill form propped upon a settle.

“Please, my friend, continue your tale. Tell it as you wish, in whatever manner the god instructs you.”

TWENTY

I
had watched the army marshal on the plain beneath Athena of the Brazen House perhaps fifty times over the previous nine years, in various strengths of call-up as it prepared to march out to one campaign or another. This one, the corps dispatched to the Hot Gates, was the slenderest ever. Not a two-thirds call-up as before Oenophyta, when nearly six thousand warriors, squires and their battle train had filled the plain, nor a half-mobilization, forty-five hundred, as before Achilleion, nor even a two-
mora,
twenty-five hundred, when Leonidas led the force to Antirhion which Alexandros and I had followed as boys.

Three hundred.

The meager tally seemed to rattle about the plain like peas in a jar. Just three dozen pack animals stood in the fore along the roadway. There were only eight waggons; the sacrificial herd was marshaled by two scared-looking goat boys. Supply trains had already been dispatched and dumps set up along the six-day route. In addition, it was anticipated, the allied cities would provide provisions along the way, as the Spartan forerunners picked up the various contingents which would complete the force and bring it to its full complement of four thousand.

An august silence pervaded the valedictory sacrifices performed by Leonidas in his role as chief priest, assisted by Olympieus and Megistias, the Theban seer who had come to Lakedaemon of his own volition, with his son, out of love not of his native city alone, but of all Hellas, to contribute without fee or reward his art in divination.

The entire army, all twelve
lochoi,
had been drawn up, not under arms because of the Karneian prohibition but yet in their scarlet cloaks, to witness the march-out. Each warrior of the Three Hundred stood garlanded,
xiphos
-armed with shield at the carry, scarlet cloak draped across his shoulders, while his squire stood at his side holding the spear until the sacrifices were completed. It was the month, as I said, of Karneius, the new year having begun at midsummer as it does in the Greek calendar, and each man was due to receive his new cloak for the year, replacing the now-threadbare one he had worn for the previous four seasons. Leonidas ordered the issue discontinued for the Three Hundred. It would be an improvident use of the city's resources, he declared, to provide new garments for men who would have use of them for so brief a time.

As Medon had predicted, Dienekes was chosen as one of the Three Hundred. Medon himself was selected. At fifty-six he was the fourth oldest, behind only Leonidas himself, who was past sixty, Olympieus and Megistias the seer. Dienekes would command the
enomotia
from the Herakles regiment. The brothers and champions of Olympia, Alpheus and Maron, were likewise selected; they would join the platoon representing the Oleaster, the Wild Olive, whose position would be to the right of the Knights, in the center of the line. Fighting as a
dyas,
the paired pentathlete and wrestler towered invincible; their inclusion greatly heartened one and all. Aristodemos the envoy was also selected. But most startling and controversial was the election of Alexandros.

At twenty he would be the youngest line warrior and one of only a dozen, including his
agoge
-mate Ariston (of Polynikes' “broken noses”), without experience of battle. There is a proverb in Lakedaemon, “the reed beside the staff,” whose meaning is that a chain is made stronger by its possession of one unproven link. The tender hamstring that drives the wrestler to compensate with skill and cunning, the lisp that the orator extends his brilliance to overcome. The Three Hundred, Leonidas felt, would fight best not as a company of individual champions, but as a sort of army in miniature, of young and old, green and seasoned. Alexandros would join the platoon of the Herakles commanded by Dienekes; he and his mentor would fight as a
dyas.

Alexandros and Olympieus were the only father and son selected for the Three Hundred. Alexandros' infant boy, also named Olympieus, would be their survivor and maintain the line. It was a sight of extreme poignancy, there along the Aphetaid, the Going-Away Street, to watch Alexandros' bride, Agathe, only nineteen years old, hold up this babe for the final farewell. Alexandros' mother, Paraleia, she who had interrogated me so masterfully after Antirhion, stood beside the girl beneath the same myrtle grove from which Alexandros and I had departed that night years ago to follow the army.

Good-byes were said on the march as the formation trooped solemnly past the rubble-walled assembly platform called the Forts, beneath the hero shrines of Lelex and Amphiareus, to the road's turn at the Running Course, above which the boys' platoons clustered at Axiopoinos, the Temple of Athena of Just Requital, Athena Tit for Tat. I watched Polynikes bid his three lads farewell; the eldest at eleven and nine stood already in the
agoge.
They straightened within their black cloaks with the gravest dignity; each would have cut off his right arm for the chance to march now with his father.

Dienekes paused before Arete on the roadside adjacent the Hellenion, whose porches stood bedecked in laurel with ribands of yellow and blue for the Karneia; she held out Rooster's boy, now named Idotychides. My master took each of his daughters in turn into his arms, lifting the younger two and kissing them with tenderness. Arete he embraced one time, setting his cheek against her neck, to smell the scent of her hair for the last time.

Two days previous to this gentle moment, the lady had summoned me in private, as she always did before a march-out. It is the Spartans' custom during the week preceding a departure for war for the Peers to pass a day neither in training nor drill, but at their ease upon the
kleroi,
the farmsteads each warrior holds under the laws of Lykurgus and from which he draws the produce which supports himself and his family as a citizen and a Peer. These “county days,” as they are called, comprise a homely tradition deriving, reason must surmise, from the warrior's natural wish to revisit prior to battle, and in a sense bid farewell to, the happy scenes of his childhood. That and the more practical purpose, in the ancient days at least, of outfitting and provisioning himself from the
kleros
's stores. A county day is a fair, one of the rare occasions when a Peer and those who serve his land may congregate as fellows and stuff their bellies with a carefree heart. In any event this was where we headed, to the farmstead called Daphneion, several mornings before the march-out to the Gates.

Two families of Messenian helots worked this land, twenty-three in all, including a pair of grandmothers, twins, so ancient they could not recall which of them was which, plus the only slightly less dotty stump-leg Kamerion, who had lost his right foot in service as Dienekes' father's squire. This toothless gaffer could outswear the foulest-tongued sailor and presided at his own insistence, and to the delight of all, as master of ceremonies for the day.

My own wife and children served this farm as well. Neighbors visited from the adjoining landholdings. Prizes were awarded in whimsical categories; there was a country dance, outdoors on the threshing floor beside the laurel grove from which the farm derived its name, and various children's games were held, before the party settled in late afternoon to a communal feast beneath the trees, at which Dienekes himself and the lady Arete and their daughters did the serving. Gifts were exchanged, quarrels and grievances patched up, claims pressed and complaints aired. If a lad of the
kleros
sought betrothal to his sweetheart from the overhill farm, he might approach Dienekes now and claim his blessing.

Invariably two or three of the sturdier helot youths and men would be slated to accompany the army, as craftsmen or armorers, battle squires or javelineers. Far from resenting or seeking to shirk these perils, the young bucks reveled in the manly attention; their sweethearts clung to them throughout the day, and many a proposal of marriage was spawned in the wine-merry amorousness of these bright country afternoons.

By the time the merry party had “put aside all desire for food and drink,” as Homer says, more grain and fruit, wine and cakes and cheeses had been heaped at Dienekes' feet than he could carry into a hundred battles. He now retired to the courtyard table, with the elders of the farm, to conclude whatever details remained to set the affairs of the
kleros
in order before the march-out.

It was when the men had turned themselves to this business that the lady Arete motioned me to join her in private. We sat before a table in the farm kitchen. It was a cheerful spot, warm in the late sun that flooded through the courtyard doorway. The lad Idotychides, Rooster's boy, played outside with two other naked urchins, including my own son, Skamandridas. The lady's eyes rested for a moment, with sorrow it seemed, upon the roughhousing little fellows.

“The gods remain always a jump ahead of us, don't they, Xeo?”

This was the first hint I had received from her lips confirming that which none possessed the courage to ask: that the lady had indeed not foreseen the consequences of her action, that night of the
krypteia,
when she had saved the babe's life.

She cleared a space upon the table. Into my care the lady placed, as ever, those articles of her husband's kit which it was a wife's responsibility to provide. The surgeon's packet, bound in the thick oxhide roll that doubled as a wrap for a splint or, bound flat atop the flesh, as seal for a puncture. The three curved needles of Egyptian gold, called by the Spartans “fishhooks,” with their spool of catgut twine and steel lancet, for use in the tailor's art of sewing flesh. The compresses of bleached linen, the tourniquet binders of leather, the copper “dog bites,” the needle-nosed grippers for extracting arrowheads or, more often, the shards and slivers that fly from the clash of steel upon iron and iron upon bronze.

Next, money. A cache of Aeginetan obols that, as all coin or currency, the warriors were forbidden to carry but which, discovered serendipitously within a squire's pack, would come in handy at some on-route market or beside the sutler's waggon, to procure forgotten necessaries or to purchase a treat to lift the heart.

Finally those articles of purely personal significance, the little surprises and charms, items of superstition, the private talismans of love. A girl's sketch in colored wax, a riband from a daughter's hair, a charm in amber carved by a child's untutored hand. Into my care the lady placed a packet of sweets and trifles, sesame cakes and candied figs. “You may rifle your share,” she said, smiling, “but save a few for my husband.”

There was always something for me. This day it was a pouch of coins of the Athenians, twenty in all, tetradrachms, nearly three months' pay for a skilled oarsman or hoplite of their army. I was astonished that the lady possessed such a sum, even of her own purse, and struck dumb at her extravagant generosity. These “owls,” as they were called from the image on their obverse, were good not just in the city of Athena but anywhere in Greece.

“When you accompanied my husband on embassy to Athens last month,” the lady broke my dumbstruck silence, “did you find occasion to visit your cousin? Diomache. That is her name, isn't it?”

I had and she knew it. This wish of mine, long-sought, had indeed at last been fulfilled. Dienekes had dispatched me upon the errand himself. Now I glimpsed a hint of the lady's pot-stirring. I asked if it was she, Arete, who had contrived it all.

“We wives of Lakedaemon are forbidden fine gowns or jewelry or cosmetics. It would be heartless in the extreme, don't you think, to ban as well a little innocent intrigue?”

She smiled at me, waiting.

“Well?” she asked.

“Well, what?”

My wife, Thereia, was gossiping with the other farm women, out in the courtyard. I squirmed. “My cousin is a married woman, lady. As I am a married man.”

The lady's eyes threw sparks of mischief. “You would not be the first husband bound by love to someone other than his wife. Nor she the first wife.”

At once all teasing gaiety fled from the lady's glance. Her features became grave and shadowed, it seemed, with sorrow.

“The gods played the same trick on my husband and me.” She rose, indicating the door and the courtyard beyond. “Come, let us take a walk.”

The lady led barefoot up the slope to a shady spot beneath the oaks. In what country other than Lakedaemon would a noblewoman's soles be so thick with callus that they may tread upon the spiky leaves of oak and not feel their spiny barbs?

“You know, Xeo, that I was wife to my husband's brother before I was married to him.”

This I did know, having learned it, as I said, from Dienekes himself.

“Iatrokles was his name, I know you have heard the story. He was killed at Pellene, a hero's death, at thirty-one. He was the noblest of his generation, a Knight and a victor at Olympia, gifted by the gods with virtue and beauty much like Polynikes in this generation. He pursued me passionately, with such impetuousness that he called me from my father's house when I was still a girl. All this the Spartans know. But I will tell you something now which no one, except my husband, knows.”

The lady had reached a low bole of oak, a natural bench within the shade of the grove. She sat and indicated that I should take the place beside her.

“Down there,” she said, gesturing to the open space between two outbuildings and the track that led to the threshing floor. “Right there where the path turns was where I first saw Dienekes. It was on a county day just like this. The occasion was Iatrokles' first march-out. He was twenty. My father had brought me and my brother and sisters over from our own
kleros
with gifts of fruit and a yearling goat. The boys of the farm were playing, right there, when I came, holding my father's hand, over this knoll where you and I now sit.”

The lady drew up. For a moment she searched my eyes, as if to make certain of their attention and understanding.