Gates of Fire (38 page)

This, too, was Leonidas' decision. It had been agreed among the commanders, the king now informed the warriors, no longer to fight in sallies from behind the Wall as in the previous two days but instead to put its stones at the defenders' backs and advance in a body into the widest part of the pass, there to engage the enemy, the allied scores against the Empire's myriads. The king's intent was that each man sell his life as dearly as possible.

Just as order of battle was being assigned, a herald's trumpet of the enemy sounded from beyond the Narrows. Under a banner of parley a party of four Persian riders in their most brilliant armor picked their way across the carpet of carnage and reined in directly beneath the Wall. Leonidas had been wounded in both legs and could barely hobble. With painful effort he mounted the battlement; the troops climbed with him; the whole force, what there was of it, looked down on the horsemen from atop the Wall.

The envoy was Ptammitechus, the Egyptian marine Tommie. This time his young son did not accompany him as interpreter; that function was performed by an officer of the Persians. Both their mounts, and the two heralds', were balking violently amid the underfoot corpses. Before Tommie could commence his speech, Leonidas cut him off.

“The answer is no,” he called down from the Wall.

“You haven't heard the offer.”

“Fuck the offer,” Leonidas cried with a grin. “And yourself, sir, along with it!”

The Egyptian laughed, his smile flashing as brilliantly as ever. He strained against the reins of his spooking horse. “Xerxes does not want your lives, sir,” Tommie called. “Only your arms.”

Leonidas laughed. “Tell him to come and get them.”

With a wheel-about, the king terminated the interview. Despite his carved-up legs he disdained help dismounting the Wall. He whistled up the assembly. Atop the stones the Spartans and Thespaians watched the Persian envoys rein their mounts about and withdraw.

Behind the Wall, Leonidas again took station before the assembly. The triceps muscle in his left arm had been severed; he would fight today with his shield strapped with leather across his shoulder. The Spartan king's demeanor nonetheless could only be described as cheerful. His eyes shone and his voice carried easily with force and command.

“Why do we remain in this place? A man would have to be cracked not to ask that question. Is it for glory? If it were for that alone, believe me, brothers, I'd be the first to wheel my ass to the foe and trot like hell over that hill.”

Laughter greeted this from the king. He let the swell subside, raising his good arm for silence.

“If we had withdrawn from these Gates today, brothers, no matter what prodigies of valor we had performed up till now, this battle would have been perceived as a defeat. A defeat which would have confirmed for all Greece that which the enemy most wishes her to believe: the futility of resistance to the Persian and his millions. If we had saved our skins today, one by one the separate cities would have caved in behind us, until the whole of Hellas had fallen.”

The men listened soberly, knowing the king's assessment accurately reflected reality.

“But by our deaths here with honor, in the face of these insuperable odds, we transform vanquishment into victory. With our lives we sow courage in the hearts of our allies and the brothers of our armies left behind. They are the ones who will ultimately produce victory, not us. It was never in the stars for us. Our role today is what we all knew it was when we embraced our wives and children and turned our feet upon the march-out: to stand and die. That we have sworn and that we will perform.”

The king's belly grumbled, loudly, of hunger; from the front ranks laughter broke the assembly's sober mien and rippled to the rear. Leonidas motioned with a grin to the squires preparing bread, urging them to snap it up.

“Our allied brothers are on the road to home now.” The king gestured down the track, the road that ran to southern Greece and safety. “We must cover their withdrawal; otherwise the enemy's cavalry will roll unimpeded through these Gates and ride our comrades down before they've gotten ten miles. If we can hold a few hours more, our brothers will be safe.”

He inquired if any among the assembly wished also to speak.

Alpheus stepped to the fore. “I'm hungry too so I'll keep it short.” He drew up shyly, in the unwonted role of speaker. I realized for the first time that his brother, Maron, stood nowhere among the ranks. This hero had died during the night, I heard a man whisper, of wounds sustained the previous day.

Alpheus spoke quickly, unblessed by the orator's gift but graced simply with the sincerity of his heart. “In one way only have the gods permitted mortals to surpass them. Man may give that which the gods cannot, all he possesses, his life. My own I set down with joy, for you, friends, who have become the brother I no longer possess.”

He turned abruptly and melted back into the ranks.

The men began calling for Dithyrambos. The Thespaian stepped forth with his usual profane glint. He gestured toward the pass beyond the Narrows, where the advance parties of the Persians had arrived and begun staking out the marshaling salients for the army. “Just go out there,” he proclaimed, “and have fun!”

Dark laughter cut the assembly. Several others of the Thespaians spoke. They were more curt than the Spartans. When they finished, Polynikes stepped to the front.

“It is no hard thing for a man raised under the laws of Lykurgus to offer up his life for his country. For me and for these Spartans, all of whom have living sons, and who have known since boyhood that this was the end they were called to, it is an act of completion before the gods.”

He turned solemnly toward the Thespaians and the freed squires and helots.

“But for you, brothers and friends…for you who will this day see all extinguished forever…”

The runner's voice cracked and broke. He choked and blew snot into his hand in lieu of the tears to whose issue his will refused to permit. For long moments he could not summon speech. He motioned for his shield; it was passed to him. He displayed it aloft.

“This
aspis
was my father's and his father's before him. I have sworn before God to die before another man took this from my hand.”

He crossed to the ranks of the Thespaians, to a man, an obscure warrior among them. Into the fellow's grasp he placed the shield.

The man accepted it, moved profoundly, and presented his own to Polynikes. Another followed, and another, until twenty, thirty shields had traded hands. Others exchanged armor and helmets with the freed squires and helots. The black cloaks of the Thespaians and the scarlet of the Lakedaemonians intermingled until all distinction between the nations had been effaced.

The men called for Dienekes. They wanted a quip, a wisecrack, something short and pithy as he was known for. He resisted. You could see he did not wish to speak.

“Brothers, I'm not a king or a general. I've never held rank beyond that of a platoon commander. So I say to you now only what I would say to my own men, knowing the fear that stands unspoken in each heart—not of death, but worse, of faltering or failing, of somehow proving unworthy in this, the ultimate hour.”

These words had struck the mark; one could read it plain on the faces of the silent, raptly attending men.

“Here is what you do, friends. Forget country. Forget king. Forget wife and children and freedom. Forget every concept, however noble, that you imagine you fight for here today. Act for this alone: for the man who stands at your shoulder. He is everything, and everything is contained within him. That's all I know. That's all I can tell you.”

He finished and stepped back. At the rear of the assembly a commotion was heard. The ranks rustled; into view emerged the Spartan Eurytus. This was the man, stricken with field blindness, who had been evacuated to Alpenoi village, along with the envoy Aristodemos, felled by this same inflammation. Now Eurytus returned, sightless, yet armed and in armor, led by his squire. Without a word he steered himself into place among the ranks.

The men, whose courage had already been high, felt this now refire and redouble.

Leonidas stepped forth now and reassumed the
skeptron
of command. He proposed that the Thespaian captains take these final moments to commune in private with their own countrymen, while he spoke apart for the Spartans alone.

The men of the two cities divided, each to its own. There remained just over two hundred Peers and freedmen of Lakedaemon. These assembled, without regard to rank or station, compactly about their king. All knew Leonidas would address appeals to nothing so grand as liberty or law or the preservation of Hellas from the tyrant's yoke.

Instead he spoke, in words few and plain, of the valley of the Eurotas, of Parnon and Taygetos and the cluster of five unwalled villages which alone comprise that
polis
and commonwealth which the world calls Sparta. A thousand years from now, Leonidas declared, two thousand, three thousand years hence, men a hundred generations yet unborn may for their private purposes make journey to our country.

“They will come, scholars perhaps, or travelers from beyond the sea, prompted by curiosity regarding the past or appetite for knowledge of the ancients. They will peer out across our plain and probe among the stone and rubble of our nation. What will they learn of us? Their shovels will unearth neither brilliant palaces nor temples; their picks will prise forth no everlasting architecture or art. What will remain of the Spartans? Not monuments of marble or bronze, but this, what we do here today.”

Out beyond the Narrows the enemy trumpets sounded. Clearly now could be seen the vanguard of the Persians and the chariots and armored convoys of their King.

“Now eat a good breakfast, men. For we'll all be sharing dinner in hell.”

THIRTY-FIVE

H
is Majesty witnessed at close range, with His own eyes, the magnificent valor demonstrated by the Spartans, Thespaians and their emancipated squires and servants upon this, the final morning of defense of the pass. He has no need of my recounting the events of this battle. I will report only those instances and moments which may have escaped the notice of His Majesty's vantage, again, as he has requested, to shed light upon the character of the Hellenes he there called his enemy.

Foremost among all, and indisputable in claim to preeminence, may be only one man, the Spartan king, Leonidas. As His Majesty knows, the main force of the Persian army, advancing as it had on the previous two days along the track from Trachis, did not commence its assault until long after the sun was fully up. The hour of attack in fact was closer to midday than morning and came while the Ten Thousand Immortals had not yet made their appearance in the allied rear. Such was Leonidas' disdain for death that he actually slept for most of this interval. Snoozed might be a more apt description, so free from care was the posture the king assumed upon the earth, cushioned upon his cloak as a ground cloth, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his breast, his eyes shaded by a straw sun hat and his head pillowed insouciantly upon the bowl of his shield. He might have been a boy, herding goats in some sleepy summer dale.

Of what does the nature of kingship consist? What are its qualities in itself; what the qualities it inspires in those who attend it? These, if one may presume to divine the meditations of His Majesty's heart, are the questions which most preoccupy his own reason and reflection.

Does His Majesty recall that moment, upon the slope beyond the Narrows, after Leonidas had fallen, struck through with half a dozen lances, blinded beneath his helmet staved in from the blow of a battle-axe, his left arm useless with its splintered shield lashed to his shoulder, when he fell at last under the crush of the enemy? Can His Majesty recall that surge within the melee of slaughter when a corps of Spartans hurled themselves into the teeth of the vaunting foe and flung them back, to retrieve the corpse of their king? I refer neither to the first time nor the second or third, but the fourth, when there stood fewer than a hundred of them, Peers and Knights and freedmen, dueling an enemy massed in their thousands.

I will tell His Majesty what a king is. A king does not abide within his tent while his men bleed and die upon the field. A king does not dine while his men go hungry, nor sleep when they stand at watch upon the wall. A king does not command his men's loyalty through fear nor purchase it with gold; he earns their love by the sweat of his own back and the pains he endures for their sake. That which comprises the harshest burden, a king lifts first and sets down last. A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him.

In the final moments before the actual commencement of battle, when the lines of the Persians and Medes and Sacae, the Bactrians and Illyrians, Egyptians and Macedonians, lay so close across from the defenders that their individual faces could be seen, Leonidas moved along the Spartan and Thespaian foreranks, speaking with each platoon commander individually. When he stopped beside Dienekes, I was close enough to hear his words.

“Do you hate them, Dienekes?” the king asked in the tone of a comrade, unhurried, conversational, gesturing to those captains and officers of the Persians proximately visible across the
oudenos chorion,
the no-man's-land.

Dienekes answered at once that he did not. “I see faces of gentle and noble bearing. More than a few, I think, whom one would welcome with a clap and a laugh to any table of friends.”

Leonidas clearly approved my master's answer. His eyes seemed, however, darkened with sorrow.

“I am sorry for them,” he avowed, indicating the valiant foemen who stood so proximately across. “What wouldn't they give, the noblest among them, to stand here with us now?”

That is a king, Your Majesty. A king does not expend his substance to enslave men, but by his conduct and example makes them free. His Majesty may ask, as Rooster did, and the lady Arete, why one such as I whose station could most grandly be called service and most meanly slavery, why one of such condition would die for those not of his kin and country. The answer is, they were my kin and country. I set down my life with gladness, and would do it again a hundred times, for Leonidas, for Dienekes and Alexandros and Polynikes, for Rooster and Suicide, for Arete and Diomache, Bruxieus and my own mother and father, my wife and children. I and every man there were never more free than when we gave freely obedience to those harsh laws which take life and give it back again.

Those events of the actual battle I count as nothing, for the fight was over in its profoundest sense before it began. I had slept, sitting upright against the Wall, following Leonidas' example, while we waited that hour and the hour after and the hour after that for His Majesty's army to make its move.

In my doze I discovered myself again among the hills above the city of my childhood. I was no longer a boy but myself of grown years. My cousin was there, in years still a girl, and our dogs, Lucky and Happy, exactly as they had been in the days following the sack of Astakos. Diomache had given chase to a hare and was climbing, bare-legged with extraordinary swiftness, a slope which seemed to ascend to the heavens. Bruxieus waited atop, as did my mother and father: I knew, though I could not see them. I gave chase too, seeking to overtake Diomache with all my grown strength. I could not. However swiftly I mounted, she remained ever elusive, always an interval ahead, calling to me gaily, teasingly, that I would never run fast enough to catch her.

I came awake with a start. There awaited the massed Persians, less than a bowshot away.

Leonidas stood upon his feet, out front. Dienekes as always took his stance before his platoon, which was drawn up at seven-and-three, wider and shallower than on either previous day. My place was third in the second file, for the first time in my life without my bow but clutching instead in my right hand the heavy haft of the eight-footer which had last been Doreion's. Around my left forearm, braced tight against the elbow, stood wrapped the linen-cushioned bronze sleeve bolted through the oak and the bronze facing of the
aspis
which had been Alexandros'. The helmet I wore had belonged to Lachides and the cap beneath had been that of Ariston's squire, Demades.

“Eyes on me!” Dienekes barked, and the men as always tore their glance from the enemy, who marshaled now so near across the interval that we could see the irises beneath their lashes and the gaps between their teeth. There were ungodly numbers of them. My lungs howled for air; I could feel the blood pounding within my temples and read its pulse upon the vessels of the eyes. My limbs were stone; I could feel neither hands nor feet. I prayed with every fiber, simply for the courage not to faint. Suicide stood upon my left. Dienekes stood before.

At last came the fight, which was like a tide, and within which one felt as a wave beneath the storming whims of the gods, waiting for their fancy to prescribe the hour of his extinction. Time collapsed. Elements blurred and merged. I remember one surge carrying the Spartans forward, driving the enemy by the score into the sea, and another which propelled the phalanx rearward like boats lashed gunwale-to-gunwale driven before the irresistible storm. I recall my feet, planted solid with all my strength upon the earth slick with blood and urine, as they were driven rearward, in place before the push of the foe, like the fleece-wrapped soles of a boy playing upon the mountain ice.

I saw Alpheus take on a Persian chariot single-handedly, slaying general, henchman and both flank guardsmen. When he fell, shot through the throat by a Persian arrow, Dienekes dragged him out. He got up, still fighting. I saw Polynikes and Derkylides hauling Leonidas' corpse, each with a weaponless hand upon the shoulders of the king's shattered corselet, striking at the foe with their shields as they drew back. The Spartans re-formed and rushed, fell back and broke, then re-formed again. I killed a man of the Egyptians with the butt-spike of my shivered spear as he drove his own into the wall of my guts, then an instant later, falling under the blow of an axe, clawed free over a Spartan corpse, only to recognize, beneath its hacked-open helmet, the shattered face of Alpheus.

Suicide hauled me from the fray. At last the Ten Thousand Immortals could be seen, advancing in line of battle to complete their envelopment. What remained of the Spartans and Thespaians fell rearward from the plain, to the Narrows, pouring through the sallyports of the Wall toward the final hillock.

The allies were so few now, and their weapons so spent and broken, that the Persians made bold to attack with cavalry, as they would in a rout. Suicide fell. His right foot had been chopped off. “Put me on your back!” he commanded. I knew without more words what he meant. I could hear arrows and even javelins thrumming into his yet-living flesh, shielding me as I bore him.

I saw Dienekes yet alive, slinging away one shattered
xiphos
and poring through the dirt for another. Polynikes churned past me, carrying Telamonias hobbled beside him. Half the runner's face had been sheared off; blood gushed in sheets from the opened bone of his cheek. “The dump!” he was calling, meaning that magazine of weapons which Leonidas had ordered placed in reserve behind the Wall. I felt the tissue of my belly tear and the intestines begin to spill. Suicide hung life-spent upon my back. I turned rearward toward the Narrows. Persian and Median archers in their thousands hailed bronzeheads down upon the retreating Spartans and Thespaians. Those who reached the dump were shredded like pennants in a gale.

The defenders staggered toward the knoll upon which the last stack of weapons had been cached. No more than sixty remained; Derkylides, astonishingly unwounded, rallied the survivors into a circular front. I found a strap and cinched my guts in. I was struck, for just a moment, with the impossible beauty of the day. For once no haze obscured the channel; one could make out individual stones upon the hills across the strait and track the game trails up the slopes, turn by turn.

I saw Dienekes reel beneath the blow of an axe, but had not myself the strength to rally to him. Medes and Persians, Bactrians and Sacae, were not merely pouring over the Wall but dismantling it with a frenzy. I could see horses beyond. The officers of the foe no longer required whips to drive their men forward. Over the broken stones of the Wall thundered the horsemen of His Majesty's cavalry, followed by the bucking chariots of his generals.

The Immortals marshaled round about the hillock now, pouring bowfire point-blank into the Spartans and Thespaians crouched beneath the slender shelter of their shattered and staved-in shields. Derkylides led the rush upon them. I saw him fall, and Dienekes, fighting beside him. Neither had shields, nor for all that could be seen, weapons of any kind. They went down not like heroes of Homer crashing clamorously within the carapaces of their armor, but like commanders completing their last and dirtiest job.

The enemy stood, invincible in the might of their missile fire, but somehow the Spartans reached them. They fought without shields, with only swords and then bare hands and teeth. Polynikes went after an officer. The runner still had his legs. So swiftly did he cross the space at the base of the hillock that his hands found the foe's throat even as a storm of Persian steel tore his back apart.

The last few dozen upon the hillock, rallied now by Dithyrambos, both of whose arms had been shredded by enemy fire and hung now useless at his sides, pincushioned with bolts, sought to form a front for a final rush. Chariots and Persian horsemen stampeded pell-mell into the Spartans. A battle waggon, afire, rolled over both my legs. Before the defenders, completely encircling the hillock, the Immortals had formed now in bowmen's ranks. Their bolts thundered upon the last unarmed and shattered warriors. From their rear, more archers hurled volleys over the heads of their comrades to rain upon the last survivors among the Hellenes. Backs and bellies bristled with the fletched spines of arrow butts; shot-to-pieces men sprawled in rag piles of bronze and scarlet.

The ear could hear His Majesty bawling orders, so near at hand ranged he upon his chariot. Was he calling in his foreign tongue for his men to cease fire, to capture the final defenders alive? Were those to whom he cried the marines of Egypt, under their captain, Ptammitechus, who spurned their monarch's order and rushed in to gift what Spartans and Thespaians they could reach with the final boon of death? It was impossible to see or hear within the tumult. The marines parted toward the flanks. The fury of the Persian archers redoubled as they sought with the numberless shafts of their fusillades to extinguish at last the stubborn foe who had made them pay so dearly for this mean measure of dirt.

As when a hailstorm descends unseasonably from the mountains and hurls from the sky its icy pellets upon the husbandman's newly sprouted crop, so did the bolts of the Persians in their myriads thunder down upon the Spartans and Thespaians. Now the farmer assumes his anxious station in the doorway, hearing the deluge upon the tiles of the roof, watching its bullets of ice clatter and rebound upon the stones of the walk. How fare the sprouts of spring barley? One here and there survives, as if by miracle, and holds yet its head aloft. But the planter knows this state of clemency cannot endure. He turns his face away, in obedience to the laws of God, while without, beneath the storm, the final shaft breaks and falls, overwhelmed by the insuperable onslaught of heaven.