Gates of Fire (24 page)

TWENTY-THREE

I
t was the standing order of my master on campaign that he be woken two hours before dawn, an hour prior to the men of his platoon. He insisted that these never behold him prone upon the earth, but awake always to the sight of their
enomotarch
on his feet and armed.

This night Dienekes slept even less. I felt him stir and roused myself. “Lie still,” he commanded. His hand pressed me back down. “It's not even past second watch.” He had dozed without removing his corselet and now creaked to his feet, all his scarred joints groaning. I could hear him crack the bones of his neck and hawk dry phlegm from the lungs he had seared at Oinoe, inhaling fire, which wound like the others had never truly healed.

“Let me help you, sir.”

“Sleep. Don't make me tell you twice.”

He snatched one of his spears from the stacked arms and shouldered his
aspis
by its sling cord. He took his helmet, seating it by its nasal into the warpack he now slung across his shoulders. He gimped off on his bad ankle. He was making for Leonidas' cluster among the Knights, where the king would be awake and perhaps wanting company.

Across the cramped confines the camp slumbered. A waxing moon stood above the strait, the air unseasonably chill for summer, dank as it is by the sea and made more raw by the recent storms; you could hear the breakers clearly, combing in at the base of the cliffs. I glanced across at Alexandros, pillowed upon his shield beside the snoring form of Suicide. Watch fires had banked down; across the camp the sleeping warriors' forms had stilled into lumpy piles of cloaks and sleeping capes that looked more like sacks of discarded laundry than men.

Toward the Middle Gate, I could see the bathhouses of the spa. These were cheerful structures of unmilled lumber, their stone thresholds worn smooth by the tread of bathers and summer visitors dating from centuries. The oiled paths meandered prettily under the oaks, lit by the olivewood lamps of the spa. A burnished wood plaque hung beneath each lamp, a snatch of verse carved upon it. I recall one:

As at birth the soul

steps into the liquid body

So step you now, friend, into these baths,

releasing flesh into soul,

reunited, divine.

I remembered something my master had once said about battlefields. This was at Tritaea, when the army met the Achaians in a field of seedling barley. The climactic slaughter had taken place opposite a temple to which in time of peace the deranged and god-possessed were conveyed by their families, to pray and offer sacrifice to Demeter Merciful and Persephone. “No surveyor marks out a tract and declares, ‘Here we shall have a battle.' The ground is often consecrated to a peaceful purpose, frequently one of succor and compassion. The irony can get pretty thick sometimes.”

And yet within Hellas' mountainous and topographically hostile confines, there existed those sites hospitable to war—Oenophyta, Tanagra, Koroneia, Marathon, Chaeronea, Leuktra—those plains and defiles upon and within which armies had clashed for generations.

This pass of the Hot Gates was such a site. Here in these precipitous straits, contending forces had slugged it out as far back as Jason and Herakles. Hill tribes had fought here, savage clans and seaborne raiders, migrating hordes, barbarians and invaders of the north and west. The tides of war and peace had alternated in this site for centuries, bathers and warriors, one come for the waters, the other for blood.

The battle wall had now been completed. One end abutted the sheer face of the cliff, with a stout tower flush to the stone, the other tailing off at an angle across the slope to the cliffs and the sea. It was a good-looking wall. Two spear-lengths thick at the base and twice the height of a man. The face toward the enemy had not been erected sheer in the manner of a city battlement, but left deliberately sloped, right up to the actual sallyports at the crest, where the final four feet rose vertical as a fortress. This was so the warriors of the allies could scamper rearward to safety if they had to, and not find themselves pinned and crushed against their own wall.

The rear face sloped up in stacked steps for the defenders to mount to the battlements, atop which had been anchored a stout timber palisade sheathed in hides which the standing watches could cast loose so that the tow arrows of the enemy would not set the palisade alight. The masonry was ragged stuff but sturdy. Towers stood at intervals, reinforcing redoubts right, left and center and secondary walls behind these. These strongpoints had been built solid to the height of the primary wall, then stacked with heavy stones to a man's height beyond. These loose boulders could be tumbled, should necessity dictate, into the breaches of the lower sallyports. I could see the sentries now atop the Wall and the three ready platoons, two Arkadian and one Spartan, in full
panoplia,
at each redoubt.

Leonidas was in fact awake. His long steel-colored hair could be distinguished clearly beside the commanders' fire. Dienekes attended him there among a knot of officers. I could make out Dithyrambos, the Thespaian captain; Leontiades, the Theban commander; Polynikes; the brothers Alpheus and Maron, and several other Spartan Knights.

The sky had begun to lighten; I became aware of forms stirring beside me. Alexandros and Ariston had come awake as well and now roused themselves and took station beside me. These young warriors, like myself, found their gaze drawn irresistibly to the officers and champions surrounding the king. The veterans, all knew, would acquit themselves with honor. “How will we do?” Alexandros put into words the anxiety that loitered unspoken in his youthful mates' hearts. “Will we find the answer to Dienekes' question? Will we discover within ourselves ‘the opposite of fear'?”

Three days before the march-out from Sparta, my master had assembled the warriors and squires of his platoon and outfitted a hunt at his own expense. This was in the form of a farewell, not to each other, but to the hills of their native country. None spoke a word of the Gates or of the trials to come. It was a grand outing, blessed by the gods with several excellent kills including a fine boar brought down in its charge by Suicide and Ariston with the javelin and the foot-braced pike.

At dusk the hunters, beyond a dozen with twice that number of squires and helots serving as beaters, settled in high spirits about several fires among the hills above Therai.
Phobos
took a seat as well. As the other huntsmen made merry around their separate blazes, diverting themselves with lies of the chase and good-fellow jesting, Dienekes cleared space beside his own station for Alexandros and Ariston and bade them sit. I discerned then my master's subtle intent. He was going to speak of fear, for these unblooded youths whom he knew despite their silence, or perhaps because of it, had begun in their hearts to dwell upon the trials to come.

“All my life,” Dienekes began, “one question has haunted me. What is the opposite of fear?”

Down the slope the boar flesh was coming ready; portions were being shared out to eager hands. Suicide came up, with bowls for Dienekes, Alexandros and Ariston, and one apiece for himself, Ariston's squire Demades and me. He settled on the earth across from Dienekes, flanked by two of the hounds who had noses for the scraps and knew Suicide as a notorious soft touch.

“To call it
aphobia,
fearlessness, is without meaning. This is just a name, thesis expressed as antithesis. To call the opposite of fear fearlessness is to say nothing. I want to know its true obverse, as day of night and heaven of earth.”

“Expressed as a positive,” Ariston ventured.

“Exactly!” Dienekes met the young man's eyes in approval. He paused to study both youths' expressions. Would they listen? Did they care? Were they, like him, true students of this subject?

“How does one conquer fear of death, that most primordial of terrors, which resides in our very blood, as in all life, beasts as well as men?” He indicated the hounds flanking Suicide. “Dogs in a pack find courage to take on a lion. Each hound knows his place. He fears the dog ranked above and feeds off the fear of the dog below. Fear conquers fear. This is how we Spartans do it, counterpoising to fear of death a greater fear: that of dishonor. Of exclusion from the pack.”

Suicide took this moment to toss several scraps to the dogs. Furiously their jaws snapped these remnants from the turf, the stronger of the two seizing the lion's share.

Dienekes smiled darkly.

“But is that courage? Is not acting out of fear of dishonor still, in essence, acting out of fear?”

Alexandros asked what he was seeking.

“Something nobler. A higher form of the mystery. Pure. Infallible.”

He declared that in all other questions one may look for wisdom to the gods. “But not in matters of courage. What have the immortals to teach us? They cannot die. Their spirits are not housed, as ours, in this.” Here he indicated the body, the flesh. “The factory of fear.”

Dienekes glanced again to Suicide, then back to Alexandros, Ariston and me. “You young men imagine that we veterans, with our long experience of war, have mastered fear. But we feel it as keenly as you. More keenly, for we have more intimate experience of it. Fear lives within us twenty-four hours a day, in our sinews and our bones. Do I speak the truth, my friend?”

Suicide grinned darkly in reply.

My master grinned back. “We cobble our courage together on the spot, of rags and remnants. The main we summon out of that which is base. Fear of disgracing the city, the king, the heroes of our lines. Fear of proving ourselves unworthy of our wives and children, our brothers, our comrades-in-arms. For myself I know all the tricks of the breath and of song, the pillars of the
tetrathesis,
the teachings of the
phobologia.
I know how to close with my man, how to convince myself that his terror is greater than my own. Perhaps it is. I employ care for the men-at-arms serving beneath me and seek to forget my own fear in concern for their survival. But it's always there. The closest I've come is to act despite terror. But that's not it either. Not the kind of courage I'm talking about. Nor is beastlike fury or panic-spawned self-preservation. These are
katalepsis,
possession. A rat owns as much of them as a man.”

He observed that often those who seek to overcome fear of death preach that the soul does not expire with the body. “To my mind this is fatuousness. Wishful thinking. Others, barbarians primarily, say that when we die we pass on to paradise. I ask them all: if you really believe this, why not make away with yourself at once and speed the trip?

“Achilles, Homer tells us, possessed true
andreia.
But did he? Scion of an immortal mother, dipped as a babe in the waters of Styx, knowing himself to be save his heel invulnerable? Cowards would be rarer than feathers on fish if we all knew that.”

Alexandros inquired if any of the city, in Dienekes' opinion, possessed this true
andreia.

“Of all in Lakedaemon, our friend Polynikes comes closest. But even his valor I find unsatisfactory. He fights not out of fear of dishonor, but greed for glory. This may be noble, or at least unbase, but is it true
andreia?
”

Ariston asked if this higher courage in fact existed.

“It is no phantom,” Dienekes declared with conviction. “I have seen it. My brother Iatrokles possessed it in moments. When I beheld its grace upon him, I stood in awe. It radiated, sublime. In those hours he fought not like a man but a god. Leonidas has it on occasion. Olympieus doesn't. I don't. None of us here does.” He smiled. “Do you know who owns it, this pure form of courage, more than any other I have known?”

None around the fire answered.

“My wife,” Dienekes said. He turned to Alexandros. “And your mother, the lady Paraleia.” He smiled again. “There is a clue here. The seat of this higher valor, I suspect, lies in that which is female. The words themselves for courage,
andreia
and
aphobia,
are female, whereas
phobos
and
tromos,
terror, are masculine. Perhaps the god we seek is not a god at all, but a goddess. I don't know.”

You could see it did Dienekes good to speak of this. He thanked his listeners for sitting still for it. “The Spartans have no patience for such inquiries of the salon. I remember asking my brother once, on campaign, a day when he had fought like an immortal. I was mad to know what he had felt in those moments, what was the essence experienced within? He looked at me as if I had taken leave of sanity. ‘Less philosophy, Dienekes, and more virtue.'”

He laughed. “So much for that.”

My master turned sidelong then, as if to draw this inquiry to a close. Yet some impulse drew him back, to Ariston, upon whose features stood that expression of one of youthful years nerving himself to venture speech before his elders. “Spit it out, my friend,” Dienekes urged him.

“I was thinking of women's courage. I believe it is different from men's.”

The youth hesitated. Perhaps, his expression clearly bespoke, it smacked of immodesty or presumptuousness to speculate upon matters of which he possessed no experience.

Dienekes pressed him nonetheless. “Different, how?”

Ariston glanced to Alexandros, who with a grin reinforced his friend's resolve. The youth took a breath and began: “Man's courage, to give his life for his country, is great but unextraordinary. Is it not intrinsic to the nature of the male, beasts as well as men, to fight and to contend? It's what we were born to do, it's in our blood. Watch any boy. Before he can even speak, he reaches, impelled by instinct, for the staff and the sword—while his sisters unprompted shun these implements of contention and instead cuddle to their bosom the kitten and the doll.

“What is more natural to a man than to fight, or a woman to love? Is this not the imperative of a mother's blood, to give and to nurture, above all the produce of her own womb, the children she has borne in pain? We know that a lioness or she-wolf will cast away her life without hesitation to preserve her cubs or pups. Women the same. Now consider, friends, that which we call women's courage: