Gates of Fire (32 page)

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 sorrow-bound 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, self-lessness, 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. Diomache'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.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

S
uicide 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.”

Alexandros 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 Alexandros.”

We managed to dribble some wine down Rooster's throat.

“I'm sorry about your father” were his first words to Alexandros. He, Rooster, had served six years as squire to Olympieus and saved his life at Oenophyta, when the Theban 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 Thespaian sentries and dumped into the open to the rear of the Wall, smack amid the marshaling army. Blood was in the air. The Thespaian 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 Thespaian Dithyrambos.

“These dogs must receive no mercy!” Dienekes stood over the bound and blindered 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 covert 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 Thespaian. 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, refired 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. Nearing myself and Alexandros, 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 Alexandros 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.”