Gates of Fire (36 page)

THIRTY-TWO

T
wo sentries covered the west, the rear of His Majesty's pavilion. Dienekes chose this side to attack because it was the dreariest and least prominent, the flank most exposed to the gale. Of all the fragmented images that remain from this brawl which was over no more than fifty heartbeats after it began, the most vivid is of the first sentinel, an Egyptian marine, a six-footer with a helmet the color of gold, decorated with stubby silver griffin's wings. These marines, as His Majesty knows, wear as a badge of pride brightly colored regimental sashes of wool. It is their custom on station to drape these pennants crosswise over the chest and belt them at the waist. This night this sentry had wound his over his nose and mouth to protect against the gale and the scoring of the driven dust, enwrapping ears and brow as well, with the merest slitted sliver held open for the eyes. His body-length wicker shield he bore before him at port, wrestling its unwieldly mass in the blow. It took little imagination to perceive his misery, alone in the cold beside a single cresset howling in the blast.

Suicide advanced undetected to within thirty feet of the fellow, snaking on his belly past the buttoned-up tents of His Majesty's grooms and the loudly snapping windbreaks of linen which shielded the horses from the gale. I was half a length behind him; I could see him mutter the two-word prayer—“Deliver him,” meaning the foe—to his savage gods.

Blearily the sentry blinked up. Out of the darkness, tearing directly for him, he beheld the hurtling form of the Scythian clutching in his left fist a pair of dart-length javelins, with the bronze-sheathed killing point of a third poised in throwing position beside his right ear. So bizarre and unexpected must this sight have been that the marine did not even react with alarm. With his spear hand he tugged nonchalantly at the sash that shielded his eyes, as if muttering to himself at the obligation to respond to this sudden and unwonted irritation.

Suicide's first javelin drove so powerfully through the apple of the man's throat that its point burst all the way through the neck and out the spine, its ash extending crimson, half an arm's length beyond. The man dropped like a rock. In an instant Suicide was upon him, tearing the darning needle out with such a savage wrench that it brought half the man's windpipe with it.

The second sentry, ten feet to the left of the first, was just turning in bewilderment, clearly disbelieving yet the evidence of his senses, when Polynikes blindsided him on a dead sprint, slamming the man on his unshielded right a blow of such ferocious impact with his own shoulder-driven shield that the fellow was catapulted off his feet and hurled bodily through the air. The breath expelled from the guardsman's lungs, his spine crashed into the dirt; Polynikes' lizard-sticker punched through his breast so hard you could hear the bone shiver and crack even over the gale.

The raiders dashed to the tent wall. Alexandros' blade slashed a diagonal in the bucking linen. Dienekes, Doreion, Polynikes, Lachides, then Alexandros, Hound, Rooster and Ball Player blasted through. We had been seen. The sentries on either side bawled the alarm. It had all happened so swiftly, however, that the pickets could not at first credit the substance their eyes beheld. Clearly they had orders to remain at their posts and this they half did, at least the nearest two, advancing toward Suicide and me (the only ones yet outside the pavilion) with an abashed and befuddled tentativeness. I had an arrow nocked in my bow, with three more clutched in my left fist around the grip, and was raising to fire. “Hold!” Suicide shouted into my ear in the gale. “Give 'em a grin.”

I thought he was mad. But that's just what he did. Gesturing like a crony, calling to the sentries in his tongue, the Scythian put on a performance, acting as if this were just some kind of drill which perhaps these sentries had missed at the briefing. It held them for about two heartbeats. Then another dozen marines roared from the pavilion's front. We turned and plunged into the tent.

The interior was pitch-black and filled with shrieking women. The rest of our party was nowhere to be seen. We saw lamplight flare across the chamber. It was Hound. A naked woman had him about one leg, burying her teeth into the meat of his calf. The lamplight from the next chamber illuminated the Skirite's blade as he drove it like a cleaver, slicing through the gristle of her cervical spine. Hound gestured to the chamber. “Torch it!”

We were in some kind of concubines' seraglio. The pavilion as a whole must have had twenty chambers. Who the hell knew which was the King's? I dashed for the single lit lamp and jammed its flame into a closet of women's undergarments; in an instant the whole brothel was howling.

Marines were pouring in behind us, among the shrieking whores. We raced after Hound, in the direction he had taken down the corridor. Clearly we were all the way at the pavilion's rear. The next chamber must have been the eunuchs'; I saw Dienekes and Alexandros, shield by shield, blast through a pair of skull-shaved titans, not even pausing to strike but just bowling them over. Rooster disemboweled one with a swing of his
xiphos;
Ball Player chopped another down with his axe. Polynikes, Doreion and Lachides emerged ahead, from some kind of bedchamber, spearpoints dripping blood. “Fucking priests!” Doreion shouted in frustration. A Magus staggered forth, gutted, and dropped.

Doreion and Polynikes were in the lead when the party hit His Majesty's chamber. The space was vast, big as a barn and studded with so many ridgepoles of ebony and cedar that it looked like a forest. Lamps and cressets lit the vault like noon. The ministers of the Persians were awake and assembled in council. Perhaps they had risen early for the morrow, perhaps they had never gone to bed. I turned the corner into this chamber just as Dienekes, Alexandros, Hound and Lachides caught up with Polynikes and Doreion and formed in line, shield by shield, to attack. We could see the generals and ministers of His Majesty, thirty feet away across the floor, which was not dirt but platformed wood, stout and level as a temple, and carpeted so thick with rugs that it muffled all sound of onrushing feet.

It was impossible to tell which of the Persians was His Majesty, all were so magnificently appareled and all of such surpassing height and handsomeness. Their numbers were a dozen, excluding scribes, guards and servants, and every man was armed. Clearly they had learned of the attack only moments earlier; they clutched scimitars, bows and axes and seemed by their expressions not yet to believe the evidence of their eyes. Without a word the Spartans charged.

Suddenly there were birds. Exotic species by the dozen and the score, apparently brought from Persia for His Majesty's amusement, now clattered into flight at the feet of the onsurging Spartans. Some array of cages had either been spilled or trampled open, who knows by whom, perhaps one of the Spartans in the confusion, perhaps a quick-thinking servant of His Majesty, but at once and in the midst of the attack, a hundred or more shrieking harpies erupted into the interior of the pavilion, flying creatures of every hue, howling and churning the space to madness with the wild clatter and frenzy of their wings.

Those birds saved His Majesty. They and the ridgepoles which supported the vault of the pavilion like the hundred columns of a temple. These in combination, and their unexpectedness, threw off the rush of the attackers just enough for His Majesty's marines and those remaining household guards of the Immortals to secure with their swarming bodies the space before His Majesty's person.

The Persians within the tent fought just as their fellows had in the pass and at the Narrows. Their accustomed weapons were of the missile type, javelins, lances and arrows, and they sought space, an interval of distance from which to launch them. The Spartans on the other hand were trained to close breast-to-breast with the foe. Before one could draw breath, the locked shields of the Lakedaemonians were pincushioned with arrow shafts and lanceheads. One heartbeat more and their bronze facings slammed into the frantically massing bodies of the foe. For an instant it seemed as if they would utterly trample the Persians. I saw Polynikes bury his eight-footer overhand in the face of one nobleman, jerk its gore-dripping point free and plunge it into the breast of another. Dienekes, with Alexandros on his left, slew three so quickly the eye could barely assimilate it. On the right Ball Player was hacking like a madman with his throwing axe, directly into a shrieking knot of priests and secretaries cowering upon the floor.

The servants of His Majesty sacrificed themselves with stupefying valor. Two directly ahead of me, youths without even the start of a beard, tore in tandem a carpet from the floor, thick as a shepherd's winter coat, and, employing it as a shield, flung themselves upon Rooster and Doreion. If one had had time to laugh, the sight of Rooster's fury as he plunged his
xiphos
in frustration into that rug would have prompted gales of hilarity. He tore the first servant's throat out with his bare hands and caved in the second's skull with a lamp still aflame.

For myself, I had loosed with such furious speed all four of the arrows I clutched ready in my left hand that I was empty and groping to the quiver before I could spit. There was no time even to follow the shafts' flight to see if they had found their marks. My right hand was just clutching a fistful more from the sleeve at my shoulder when I raised my eyes and saw the burnished steel head of a hurled battle-axe pinwheeling straight for my skull. Instinct jerked my legs from beneath me; it seemed an eternity before my weight began to make me fall. The axehead was so close I could hear its whirling thrum and see the purple ostrich plume on its flank and the double-headed griffin imprinted on the steel. The killing edge was half an arm's length from the space between my eyes when a ridgepole of cedar, whose presence I had not even been aware of, intercepted the homicidal rush of its flight. The axehead buried palm-deep in the wood. I had half an instant to glimpse the face of the man who had flung the blade and then the whole wall of the chamber blew apart.

Egyptian marines poured through, twenty of them followed at once by twenty more. The whole side of the tent was now open to the gale. I saw the captain Tommie clash shield-to-shield with Polynikes. Those lunatic birds thrashed everywhere. Hound went down. A two-handed axe tore open his guts. An arrow shaft ripped through Doreion's throat; he reeled backward with blood spewing from his teeth. Dienekes was hit; he buckled rearward onto Suicide. In the fore remained only Alexandros, Polynikes, Lachides, Ball Player and Rooster. I saw the outlaw stagger. Polynikes and Rooster were swamped by inrushing marines.

Alexandros was alone. He had singled out the person of His Majesty or some nobleman he took for him and now, with his eight-footer cocked overhand above his right ear, prepared to hurl the spear across the wall of enemy defenders. I could see his right foot plant, concentrating all force of leg and limb behind the blow. Just as his shoulder started forward, arm extended in the throw, a noble of the Persians, the general Mardonius I later learned, delivered with his scimitar a blow of such force and precision that it took Alexandros' hand off right at the wrist.

As in moments of extreme emergency time seems to slow, permitting the vision to perceive instant by instant that which unfolds before the eyes, I could see Alexandros' hand, its fingers still gripping the spear, hang momentarily in midair, then plummet, yet clutching the ashen shaft. His right arm and shoulder continued forward with all their force, the stump at the wrist now spraying bright blood. For an instant Alexandros did not realize what had happened. Discomfiture and disbelief flooded his eyes; he couldn't understand why his spear was not flying forward. A blow of a battle-axe thundered upon his shield, driving him to his knees. I was in too tight to use my bow to defend him; I dove for the fallen shaft of his eight-footer, hoping to thrust it back at the Persian noble before his scimitar could find the mark to decapitate my friend.

Before I could move, Dienekes was there, the huge bronze bowl of his shield covering Alexandros. “Get out!” he bellowed to all above the din. He hauled Alexandros to his feet the way a countryman yanks a lamb out of a torrent.

We were outside, in the gale.

I saw Dienekes cry an order from no farther than two arm's lengths and could not hear a word of it. He had Alexandros on his feet and was pointing up the slope past the citadel. We would not flee by the river, there was no time. “Cover them!” Suicide shouted into my ear. I felt scarlet-cloaked forms flee past me and could not tell who was who. Two were being carried. Doreion staggered from the pavilion, mortally wounded, amid a swarm of Egyptian marines. Suicide slung darning needles into the first three so fast, each seemed to sprout a lance in the belly as if by magic. I was shooting too. I saw a marine hack Doreion's head off. Behind him, Ball Player plunged from the tent, burying his axe in the man's back; then he, too, fell beneath a hail of pike and sword blows. I was empty. So was Suicide. He made to rush the enemy bare-handed; I clutched his belt and dragged him back screaming. Doreion, Hound and Ball Player were dead; the living would need us more.

THIRTY-THREE

T
he space immediately east of the pavilion stood occupied exclusively by the picketed mounts of His Majesty's personal riding stock and the service tents of their grooms. Through this open-air paddock the raiding party now fled. Linen windbreaks had been erected, dividing the enclosure into squares. It was like racing through the hanging laundry of a city's humble quarter. As Suicide and I overtook our comrades among the wind-numbed mounts, on a dead run and with the blood of terror pounding within our temples, we encountered Rooster at the party's rear, gesturing urgently to us to slow, to stop. Walk.

The party emerged into the open. Armored men advanced toward us by the hundreds. But these, as fortune or a god's hand would have it, had not been summoned to arms in response to the attack upon their King, but stood in fact in total ignorance of it. They were simply rising to the call of reveille, groggy yet and grumbling in the gale-pounded dark, to arm for the morning's resumption of battle. The marines' shouts of alarm from the pavilion were shredded in the teeth of the gale; their foot pursuit lost its way at once among the myriads in the dark.

The flight from the Persian camp became attended, as are so many moments in war, by a sense of reality so dislocated as to border upon, and even surpass, the bizarre. The party made good its escape neither sprinting nor flying, but limping and hobbling. The raiders trudged in the open, making no attempt to conceal themselves from the enemy but in fact approaching and even engaging him in converse. Irony compounded, the party itself helped spread the alarm of attack, helmetless as it was and bloodied, bearing shields from which the
lambda
of Lakedaemon had been effaced and carrying across its shoulders one desperately wounded, Alexandros, and one already dead, Lachides. For all the world, the group appeared like a squad of overwhelmed pickets. Dienekes speaking in Boeotian Greek, or as near as he could come to the accent, and Suicide in his own Scythian dialect, addressed those officers whose arming men we passed through, spreading the word “mutiny” and gesturing back, not wildly but wearily, toward the pavilion of His Majesty.

Nobody seemed to give a damn. The great bulk of the army, it was clear, were grudging draftees whose nations had been conscripted into service against their will. These now in the dank and gale-torn dawn sought only to warm their own backsides, fill their bellies and get through the day's fighting with their heads still attached.

The raiding party even received unwitting aid for Alexandros from a squad of Trachinian cavalrymen, struggling to ignite a fire for their breakfast. These took us for Thebans, the faction of that nation who had gone over to the Persian, whose turn it was that night to provide inner-perimeter security. The cavalrymen provided us with light, water and bandages while Suicide, with the hands of experience surer than any battlefield surgeon's, secured the hemorrhaging artery with a copper “dog bite.” Already he, Alexandros, was deep in shock.

“Am I dying?” he asked Dienekes in that sad detached tone so like a child's, the voice of one who seems to stand already at his own shoulder.

“You'll die when I say you can,” Dienekes answered gently.

The blood was coming in surges from Alexandros' severed wrist despite the arterial clamp, sheeting from the hacked-off veins and the hundred vessels and capillaries within the pulpy tissue. With the flat of a
xiphos
gray-hot from the fire, Suicide cauterized and bound the stump, lashing a tourniquet about the pinion point beneath the biceps. What none was aware of in the dark and the confusion, not even Alexandros himself, was the puncture wound of a lancepoint beneath his second rib and the blood pooling internally at the base of his lungs.

Dienekes himself had been wounded in the leg, his bad leg with the shattered ankle, and had lost his own share of blood. He no longer had the strength to carry Alexandros. Polynikes took over, slinging the yet-conscious warrior over his right shoulder, loosening the gripcord of Alexandros' shield to hang it as protection across his back.

Suicide collapsed halfway up the slope before the citadel. He had been shot in the groin, sometime back in the pavilion, and didn't even know it. I took him; Rooster carried Lachides' body. Dienekes' leg was coming unstrung; he needed bearing himself. In the starlight I could see the look of despair in his eyes.

We all felt the dishonor of leaving Doreion's body and Hound's, and even the outlaw's, among the foe. The shame drove the party like a lash, impelling each exhaustion-shattered limb one pace more up the brutal, steepening slope.

We were past the citadel now, skirting the felled wood where the Thessalian cavalry were picketed. These were all awake now and armed, moving out for the day's battle. A few minutes later we reached the grove where earlier we had startled the slumbering deer.

A Doric voice hailed us. It was Telamonias the boxer, the man of our party whom Dienekes had dispatched back to Leonidas with word of the mountain track and the Ten Thousand. He had returned with help. Three Spartan squires and half a dozen Thespaians. Our party dropped in exhaustion. “We've roped the trail back,” Telamonias informed Dienekes. “The climbing's not bad.”

“What about the Persian Immortals? The Ten Thousand.”

“No sign when we left. But Leonidas is withdrawing the allies. They're all pulling out, everyone but the Spartans.”

Polynikes set Alexandros gently down upon the matted grass within the grove. You could still smell the deer. I saw Dienekes feel for Alexandros' breath, then flatten his ear, listening, to the youth's chest. “Shut up!” he barked at the party. “Shut the fuck up!”

Dienekes pressed his ear tighter to the flat of Alexandros' sternum. Could he distinguish the sound of his own heart, hammering now in his chest, from that beat which he sought so desperately within the breast of his protege? Long moments passed. At last Dienekes straightened and sat up, his back seeming to bear the weight of every wound and every death across all his years.

He lifted the young man's head, tenderly, with a hand beneath the back of his neck. A cry of such grief as I had never heard tore from my master's breast. His back heaved; his shoulders shuddered. He lifted Alexandros' bloodless form into his embrace and held it, the young man's arms hanging limp as a doll's. Polynikes knelt at my master's side, draped a cloak about his shoulders and held him as he sobbed.

Never in battle or elsewhere had I, nor any of the men there present beneath the oaks, beheld Dienekes loose the reins of self-command with which he maintained so steadfast a hold upon his heart. You could see him summon now every reserve of will to draw himself back to the rigor of a Spartan and an officer. With an expulsion of breath that was not a sigh but something deeper, like the whistle of death the
daimon
makes escaping within the avenue of the throat, he released Alexandros' life-fled form and settled it gently upon the scarlet cloak spread beneath it on the earth. With his right hand he clasped that of the youth who had been his charge and protege since the morn of his birth.

“You forgot about our hunt, Alexandros.”

Eos, pallid dawn, bore now her light to the barren heavens without the thicket. Game trails and deer-trodden traces could be discerned. The eye began to make out the wild, torrent-cut slopes so like those of Therai on Taygetos, the oak groves and shaded runs that, it was certain, teemed with deer and boar and even, perhaps, a lion.

“We would have had such a grand hunt here next fall.”