Gates of Fire (35 page)

“Can we go around?”

Doreion nodded. “It's all pine. A carpet of soft needles. You can cross on a dead run and not make a sound.”

Dienekes indicated the clearing in which the parties now stood. “This will be our rally point. We'll assemble here after. You'll guide us back from this point, Doreion, or one of your party, by the way you came, the fast way.”

Dienekes had Rooster rebrief both parties on the layout of the enemy camp, in case something happened to him on the way down. The last of the wine was shared out. The skin in its sequence chanced to pass from Polynikes' hand to Rooster's. The helot seized this moment of intimacy before action. “Tell me the truth. Would you have killed my son that night with the
krypteia?”

“I'll kill him yet,” the runner answered, “if you fuck us up tonight.”

“In that case,” the helot said, “I look forward with even greater anticipation to your death.”

It was time for Ball Player to depart. He had agreed to guide the party this far and no farther. To the surprise of all, the outlaw seemed torn. “Look,” he offered haltingly, “I want to keep on with you, you're good men, I admire you. But I can't in good conscience without being compensated.”

This struck the entire party as hilarious.

“Your scruples are stern, outlaw,” Dienekes observed.

“You want compensation?” Polynikes clutched his own privates. “I'll save this for you.”

Ball Player alone did not laugh.

“Goddamn you,” he muttered, more to himself than to the others. With further grumbled curses, he took his place in the undermanned column. He was staying.

The party would no longer be divided; from here it would advance in teams of five, Ball Player attached to Polynikes' four to make up for Telamonias, but in tandem, each unit supporting the other.

The squads ghosted without incident past the snoozing Thessalians. The presence of this Greek cavalry was extremely good fortune. The way back, if there was one, would inevitably be in disorder; it would be of no small advantage to have a landmark as conspicuous in the dark as an acres-wide swath of felled forest. The Thessalians' horses could be stampeded to create confusion, and, if the party had to flee under fire through their camp, its shouts to one another in Greek would not betray it among the Greek-speaking Thessalians.

Another half hour brought the squads to the edge of a wood directly above the citadel of Trachis. The channel of the Asopus thundered beneath the city walls. It roared in torrent, deafening, with a sharp cold wind keening down the throat of the gorge.

We could see the enemy camp now.

Surely no sight beneath heaven, not Troy under siege, nor the war of the gods and Titans itself, could have equaled in scale that which now spread before our vision.

As far as the eye could see, three miles of plain extending to the sea, five miles across, with plain and more plain extending beyond sight around the shoulders of the Trachinian cliffs, thousands of acres square and all of it incandescent with the mist-magnified fires of the enemy.

“So much for them packing up.”

Dienekes motioned Rooster to him. The helot laid it out as he remembered:

Xerxes' horses drink upstream of all, before the rest of the camp. Rivers are sacred to the Persians and must be preserved unprofaned. The whole upper valley is staked out as pasturage. The Great King's pavilion, so Rooster swore, stood at the head of the plain, within bowshot of the river.

The party dropped down, directly beneath the citadel walls, and entered the current. The Eurotas in Lakedaemon is mountain-fed; even in summer its snowmelt is bone-numbingly cold. The Asopus was worse. One's limbs went to ice within moments. It was so cold we feared for our safety; if you had to get out and run, you couldn't feel your own legs and feet.

Mercifully the torrent lessened a few hundred yards down. The party rolled its cloaks into bundles and floated them on shields turned bowls-up. Dams had been erected by the enemy to abate the torrent and facilitate the watering of horses and men. Pickets had been stationed atop these, but the fog and wind made conditions so inhospitable, the hour was so late and the sentries so complacent, deeming infiltration unthinkable, that the party was able to steal past, bellying over the spillways, then coasting swiftly into the shadows along the bank.

The moon had set. Rooster could not pick out His Majesty's pavilion. “It was here, I swear it!” He pointed across to a rise of land, upon which stood nothing but a street of grooms' tents snapping in the wind and a rope picket line shoulder-to-shoulder with horses standing miserably in the gale. “They must have moved it.”

Dienekes himself drew his blade. He was going to open Rooster's throat on the spot as a traitor. Rooster swore by every god he could think of; he wasn't lying. “Things look different in the dark,” he offered lamely.

Polynikes saved him. “I believe him, Dienekes. He's so fucking stupid, this is just the way he would screw it up.”

The party slithered on, neck-deep in marrow-numbing rapids. At one point Dienekes' leg became snarled in a tangle of reeds; he had to submerge with his
xiphos
to cut himself free. He came up snorting.

I asked what he was laughing at.

“I was just wondering if it was possible to get any more miserable.” He chuckled darkly. “I suppose if a river snake crawled up my ass and gave birth to quintuplets…”

Suddenly Rooster's hand nudged my master's shoulder. A hundred paces ahead stood another dam and spillway. Three linen pavilions abutted a pleasant beach; a lantern-lit walkway snaked up the slope, past a hide corral in which were confined a dozen blanket-draped war mounts of such magnificence that the worth of each alone must have equaled the produce of a small city.

Directly above rose a copse of oak, lit by iron cressets howling in the gale, and beyond, past a single picket line of Egyptian marines, could be glimpsed the pennanted kingposts of a pavilion so vast it looked like it housed a battalion.

“That's it.” Rooster pointed. “That's Xerxes' tent.”

THIRTY-ONE

T
he warrior's thoughts at the brink of action, my master had often observed (as the student of fear he ever declared himself to be), follow a pattern unvarying and ineluctable. There appears always an interval, often brief as a heartbeat, wherein the inward eye summons the following tripartite vision, often in the selfsame order:

First to the inmost heart appear the faces of those he loves who do not share his immediate peril: his wife and mother, his children, particularly if they are female, particularly if they are young. These who will remain beneath the sun and preserve within their hearts the memory of his passage, the warrior greets with fondness and compassion. To them he bequeaths his love and to them bids farewell.

Next arise before the inward eye the shades of those already across the river, they who stand awaiting upon the distant shore of death. For my master these comprised his brother, Iatrokles, his father and mother and Arete's brother, Idotychides. These, too, the warrior's heart greets in silent vision, summons their aid and then releases.

Lastly advance the gods, whichever a man feels have favored him most, whichever he feels himself most to have favored. Into their care he releases his spirit, if he can.

Only when this triple obligation has been requited does the warrior revert to the present and turn, as if arising from a dream, to those at his shoulder, they who in a moment will undergo with him the trial of death. Here, Dienekes often observed, is where the Spartans most hold advantage over all who face them in battle. Beneath what alien banner could one discover at his shoulder such men as Leonidas, Alpheus, Maron, or here in this dirt Doreion, Polynikes and my master, Dienekes, himself? These who will share the ferry with him, the warrior's heart embraces with a love surpassing all others granted by the gods to humankind, save only that of a mother for her babe. To them he commits all, as they all to him.

My own eyes now glanced to Dienekes, crouched upon the riverbank helmetless in his scarlet cloak which showed dead black in the darkness. His right hand was kneading the joints of his immobile ankle seeking to restore flexion, as he in compact phrase issued the instructions which would drive the men he commanded into action. At his shoulder Alexandros had scraped a fistful of sand from the bank and was scoring it along the haft of his eight-footer, abrading the surface for a grip. Polynikes with a curse worked his forearm into the sodden bronze and leather sleeve of his shield, seeking the point of balance and proper hold upon the gripcord. Hound and Lachides, Ball Player, Rooster and Doreion likewise completed their preparations. I glanced to Suicide. He was sorting swiftly through his darning needles, like a surgeon selecting his instrument, picking those three, one for his throwing hand, two for his free, whose heft and balance promised the truest flight. I moved in a crouch beside the Scythian, with whom I was paired in the assault. “See you in the ferry,” he said, and tugged me with him toward the flank from which we would attack.

Would his be the last face I would see? This Scythian, mentor and instructor to me since I was fourteen. He had taught me cover and interval, dress and shadow; how to stanch a puncture wound, set a broken collarbone; how to take down a horse upon the open field, drag a wounded warrior from battle using his cloak. This man with his skill and fearlessness could have hired himself out as a mercenary to any army in the world. To the Persians if he wished. He would have been appointed captain-of-a-hundred, achieved fame and glory, women and wealth. Yet he chose to remain in the harsh academy of Lakedaemon, in service for no pay.

I thought of the merchant Elephantinos. Of all in camp, Suicide had taken most to this gay, ebullient fellow; the pair had become fast friends. On the evening before the first battle, when my master's platoon had settled, preparing the evening meal, this Elephantinos had appeared upon his rounds. He had traded away all his wares, bartered his waggon and ass, sold even his own cloak and shoes. Now on this night he circulated with a basket of pears and sweetmeats, distributing these treats to the warriors as they sat to their suppers. He stopped beside our fire. My master often sacrificed in the evenings; nothing much, just a crust of barley loaf and a libation, not praying aloud, just offering within his heart a few silent words to the gods. He would never reveal the contents of his prayer, but I could read it upon his lips and overhear the odd mumble. He was praying for Arete and his daughters.

“It is these young boys who should practice such piety,” the merchant observed, “not you grisly veterans!”

Dienekes greeted the
emporos
warmly. “You mean ‘grizzled,' my friend.”

“I mean grisly, weck up to thees!”

He was invited to sit. Bias was still alive then; he joked with the merchant about his want of forethought. How will the old-timer get away now, without his ass and waggon?

Elephantinos made no reply.

“Our friend will not be leaving,” Dienekes spoke softly, his gaze upon the earth.

Alexandros and Ariston arrived with a hare they had traded for with some boys from Alpenoi village. The old man smiled at the comradely ragging they endured from their mates over this prize. It was a “winter hare,” so scrawny it wouldn't flavor a stew for two men, let alone sixteen. The merchant regarded my master.

“To see you veterans with gray in your beards, it is only right that you should stand here at the Gates. But these boys.” His gesture indicated Alexandros and Ariston, including in its sweep myself and several other squires barely out of their teens. “How may I leave, when these babes remain?”

“I envy you comrades,” the merchant continued when the emotion had cleared from his throat. “I have searched all my life for that which you have possessed from birth, a noble city to belong to.” His smithy-scarred hand indicated the fires springing to life across the camp and the warriors, old and young, now settling beside them. “This will be my city. I will be her magistrate and her physician, her orphans' father and her fool.”

He handed out his pears and moved on. One could hear the laughter he brought to the next fire, and the one after that.

The allies had been on station at the Gates for four nights then. They had observed the scale of the Persian host, on land and sea, and knew well the odds insuperable that faced them. Yet it was not until that moment, I felt, at least for my master's platoon, that the reality of the peril to Hellas and the imminence of the defenders' own extinction truly struck home. A profound soberness settled with the vanishing sun.

For long moments no one spoke. Alexandros was skinning the hare, I was grinding barley meal in a handmill; Medon prepared the ground oven, Black Leon was chopping onions. Bias reclined against the stump of an oak felled for firewood, with Leon Donkeydick upon his left. To the startlement of all, Suicide began to speak.

“There is a goddess in my country called Na'an,” the Scythian broke the silence. “My mother was a priestess of this cult, if such a grand title may be applied to an illiterate countrywoman who lived all her life out of the back of a waggon. My mind is recalled to this by our friend the merchant and the two-wheeled cart he calls his home.”

This was as much speech at one time as I, or any other, had heard Suicide give voice to. All expected him to halt right there. To their astonishment, the Scythian continued.

His priestess mother taught him, Suicide said, that nothing beneath the sun is real. The earth and everything upon it is but a forestander, the material embodiment of a finer and more profound reality which exists immediately behind it, invisible to mortal sense. Everything we call real is sustained by this subtler fundament which underlies it, indestructible, unglimpsed beyond the curtain.

“My mother's religion teaches that those things alone are real which cannot be perceived by the senses. The soul. Mother love. Courage. These are closer to God, she taught, because they alone are the same on both sides of death, in front of the curtain and behind.

“When I first came to Lakedaemon and beheld the phalanx,” Suicide went on, “I thought it the most ludicrous form of warfare I had ever seen. In my country we fight on horseback. This to me was the only way, grand and glorious, a spectacle that stirs the soul. The phalanx looked like a joke to me. But I admired the men, their virtue, which was so clearly superior to that of every other nation I had observed and studied. It was a puzzle to me.”

I glanced to Dienekes across the fire, to see if he had previously heard these thoughts articulated by Suicide, perhaps in the years before I had entered his service, when the Scythian alone stood as his squire. Upon my master's face was written rapt attention. Clearly this bounty from Suicide's lips was as novel to him as to the others.

“Do you remember, Dienekes, when we fought the Thebans at Erythrae? When they broke and ran? This was the first rout I had witnessed. I was appalled by it. Can there exist a baser, more degrading sight beneath the sun than a phalanx breaking apart in fear? It makes one ashamed to be mortal, to behold such ignobility even in an enemy. It violates the higher laws of God.” Suicide's face, which had been a grimace of disdain, now brightened into a cheerier mode. “Ah, but the opposite: a line that holds! What can be more grand, more noble?

“One night I dreamt I marched within the phalanx. We were advancing across a plain to meet the foe. Terror froze my heart. My fellow warriors strode all around me, in front, behind, to all sides. They were all me. Myself old, myself young. I became even more terrified, as if I were coming apart into pieces. Then all began to sing. All the ‘me's,' all the ‘myself's.' As their voices rose in sweet concord, all fear fled my heart. I woke with a still breast and knew this was a dream straight from God.

“I understood then that it was the glue that made the phalanx great. The unseen glue that bound it together. I realized that all the drill and discipline you Spartans love to pound into each other's skulls were really not to inculcate skill or art, but only to produce this glue.”

Medon laughed. “And what glue have you dissolved, Suicide, that finally allows your jaws to flap with such un-Scythian immoderation?”

Suicide grinned across the fire. Medon was the one, it was said, who had originally given the Scythian his nickname, when he, guilty of a murder in his country, had fled to Sparta, where he asked again and again for death.

“When I first came to Lakedaemon and they called me ‘Suicide,' I hated it. But in time I came to see its wisdom, unintentional as it was. For what can be more noble than to slay oneself? Not literally. Not with a blade in the guts. But to extinguish the selfish self within, that part which looks only to its own preservation, to save its own skin. That, I saw, was the victory you Spartans had gained over yourselves. That was the glue. It was what you had learned and it made me stay, to learn it too.

“When a warrior fights not for himself, but for his brothers, when his most passionately sought goal is neither glory nor his own life's preservation, but to spend his substance for them, his comrades, not to abandon them, not to prove unworthy of them, then his heart truly has achieved contempt for death, and with that he transcends himself and his actions touch the sublime. This is why the true warrior cannot speak of battle save to his brothers who have been there with him. This truth is too holy, too sacred, for words. I myself would not presume to give it speech, save here now, with you.”

Black Leon had been listening attentively. “What you say is true, Suicide, if you will forgive me for calling you that. But not everything unseen is noble. Base emotions are invisible as well. Fear and greed and lust. What do you say about them?”

“Yes,” Suicide acknowledged, “but don't they feel base? They stink to heaven, they make one sick within the heart. The noble invisible things feel different. They are like music, in which the higher notes are the finer.

“This was another thing that puzzled me when I arrived in Lakedaemon. Your music. How much of it there was, not alone the martial odes or war songs you sing as you advance upon the foe, but in the dances and the choruses, the festivals and the sacrifices. Why do these consummate warriors honor music so, when they forbid all theater and art? I believe they sense that the virtues are like music. They vibrate at a higher, nobler pitch.”

He turned to Alexandros. “That is why Leonidas chose you for the Three Hundred, my young master, though he knew you had never before stood among the trumpets. He believes you will sing here at the Gates in that sublime register, not with this”—he indicated the throat—“but with this.” And his hand touched his heart.

Suicide drew up, suddenly awkward and abashed. Around the fire each face regarded him soberly and with respect. Dienekes broke the silence with a laugh.

“You're a philosopher, Suicide.”

The Scythian grinned back. “Yes,” he nodded, “weck up to thees!”

A messenger appeared, summoning Dienekes to Leonidas' council. My master motioned me to accompany him. Something had changed within him; I could sense it as we picked our way among the network of trails that crisscrossed the camps of the allies.

“Do you remember the night, Xeo, when we sat with Ariston and Alexandros and spoke of fear and its opposite?”

I said I did.

“I have the answer to my question. Our friends the merchant and the Scythian have given it to me.”

His glance took in the fires of the camp, the nations of the allies clustered in their units, and their officers, whom we could see, like us approaching from all quarters the king's fire, ready to respond to his needs and receive his instructions.

“The opposite of fear,” Dienekes said, “is love.”