Gates of Fire (10 page)

The twin ports of Rhion and Antirhion commanded the western approach to the Gulf of Corinth. This avenue threatened the Peloponnese and all of central Greece. Rhion, the near-side port, stood already within the Spartan hegemony; she was an ally. But Antirhion across the strait remained haughtily aloof, thinking herself beyond the reach of Lakedaemonian power. Leonidas meant to show her the error of her ways. He would bring her to heel and bottle up the gulf, protecting central Hellas from Persian sea assault, at least from the northwest.

Alexandros' father, Olympieus, marched past at the head of the Wild Olive regiment, with Meriones, the fifty-year-old battle captive and former Potidaean captain, beside him as his squire. This gentle fellow possessed a grand beard, white as snow; he used to secrete little treasures within its bushy nest and pluck them forth, as surprise gifts, for Alexandros and his sisters when they were children. He did this now, straying to the roadside, to place in Alexandros' hand a tiny iron charm in the shape of a shield. Meriones clasped the boy's hand with a wink and moved on.

I stood in the crowd before the Hellenion with Alexandros and the other boys of the training platoons, the women and children, the whole city drawn up beneath the acacias and cypresses, singing the hymn to Castor, as the regiments trooped out along the Going-Away Street with their shields slung and spears at the slope, helmets lashed athwart the shoulders of their crimson cloaks, bobbing atop their
polemothylakioi,
the battle packs which the Peers bore now for show but which, like their armor, would be transferred, with all kit save spears and swords, to the shoulders of their squires when the army assumed column of march and stripped for the long, dusty hump north.

Alexandros' beautiful broken face remained a mask as Dienekes strode into view, flanked by his squire, Suicide, at the head of his platoon of the Herakles
lochos.
The main body of troops passed on. Leading and accompanying each regiment trudged the pack animals laden with the supplies of the commissariat and thwacked merrily on the rumps by the switches of their helot herd boys. The train of armament waggons passed next, already obscured within a churning storm of road dust; then followed the tall victualry waggons with their cargo of oil pots and wine jars, sacks of figs, olives, leeks, onions, pomegranates and the cooking pots and ladles swinging on hooks beneath them, banging into each other musically in the dust of the mules' tread, contributing a ringing metronomic air to the cacophony of cracking whips and squalling wheel rims, teamsters' bawls and groaning axles.

Behind the provisions bearers came the portable forges and armorers' kits with their spare
xiphos
blades and butt-spikes, “lizard-stickers” and long iron spear blades, then the spare eight-footers, uncured ash and cornel shafts lashed lengthwise along the waggon rails. Helot armorers strode in the cloud alongside, clad in their dogskin caps and aprons, forearms crisscrossed with the burn scars of the smithy.

Last of all trooped the sacrificial goats and sheep, with their horns wrapped and leashes held by the helot herd urchins, led by Dekton in his already road-begrimed altar-boy white, trailering a haltered ass laden with feed grain and two victory roosters in cages, one on either side of the cargo frame. He grinned when he passed, a little flash of contempt escaping his otherwise impeccably pious demeanor.

I was deep into slumber that night, on the stone of the portico behind the ephorate, when I felt a hand shake me awake. It was Agathe, the Spartan girl who had made Alexandros' charm to Polyhymnia. “Get up, you!” she hissed, so as not to alert the score of other youths of the
agoge
asleep and on watch around these public buildings. I blinked around. Alexandros, who had been asleep beside me, was gone. “Hurry!”

The girl melted at once into shadow. I followed her swiftly through the dark streets to that copse of the double-boled myrtle they called Dioscuri, the Twins, just west of the start of the Little Ring.

Alexandros was there. He had snuck away from his platoon without me (which would have put both of us, if caught, in line for a merciless whipping). He stood now, wearing his black
pais
' cloak and battle pack, confronted by his mother, the lady Paraleia, one of their male house helots and his two younger sisters. Hard words flew. Alexandros intended to follow the army to battle. “I'm going,” he declared. “Nothing will stop me.”

I was ordered by Alexandros' mother to knock him down.

I saw something flash in his fist. His
xyele,
the sicklelike weapon all the boys carried. The women saw it too, and the deadly-grim look in the lad's eye. For a long moment, every form froze. The preposterousness of the situation was becoming more and more apparent, as was the adamantine resolution of the boy.

His mother straightened before him.

“Go, then,” the lady Paraleia addressed her son at last. She didn't need to add that I would go with him. “And may God preserve you in the lashing you receive when you return.”

TEN

I
t was not hard to follow the army. The track along the Oenous was churned to dust, ankle-deep. At Selassia the
perioikic
Stephanos regiment had joined the expedition. Alexandros and I, arriving in the dark, could still make out the trodden-bare marshaling ground and the freshly dried blood upon the altar where the sacrifices had been performed and the omens taken. The army itself was half a day ahead; we could not stop for sleep, but pushed on all night.

At dawn we came upon men we recognized. A helot armorer named Eukrates had broken his leg in a fall and was being helped home by two of his fellows. He informed us that at the frontier fort of Oion fresh intelligence had reached Leonidas. The Antirhionians, far from rolling over and playing dead as the king had hoped, had sent envoys in secret, appealing for aid to the
tyrannos
Gelon in Sikelia. Gelon could appreciate as well as Leonidas and the Persians the strategic indispensability of the port of Antirhion; he wanted it too. Forty Syrakusan ships bearing two thousand citizen and mercenary heavy infantry were on their way to reinforce the Antirhionian defenders. It would be a real battle after all.

The Spartan force pressed on through Tegea. The Tegeates, member allies of the Peloponnesian League and obligated to “follow the Spartans whithersoever they should lead,” reinforced the army with six hundred of their own heavy infantry, swelling its fighting total to beyond four thousand. Leonidas had not been seeking
parataxis,
a pitched battle, with the Antirhionians. Rather he had hoped to overawe them with a show of such force that they would perceive the folly of defiance and enroll themselves of their own free will in the alliance against the Persians. Among Dekton's herd was a wrapped bull, brought in anticipation of celebration, of festive sacrifice in honor of this new addition to the League. But the Antirhionians, perhaps bought by Gelon's gold, inflamed by the rhetoric of some glory-hungry demagogue or betrayed by a lying oracle, had chosen to make a fight of it.

When Alexandros spoke to the helots on the road, he had queried them for intelligence on the specific makeup of the Syrakusan forces: which units, under which commanders, reinforced by which auxiliaries. The helots didn't know. In any army other than the Spartan, such ignorance would have provoked a fierce tongue-lashing or worse. Yet Alexandros let it go without a thought. Among the Lakedaemonians, it is considered a matter of indifference of whom and in what the enemy consists.

The Spartans are schooled to regard the foe, any foe, as nameless and faceless. In their minds it is the mark of an ill-prepared and amateur army to rely in the moments before battle on what they call
pseudoandreia,
false courage, meaning the artificially inflated martial frenzy produced by a general's eleventh-hour harangue or some peak of bronze-banging bravado built to by shouting, shield-pounding and the like. In Alexandros' mind, which already at age fourteen mirrored that of the generals of his city, one Syrakusan was as good as the next, one enemy
strategos
no different from another. Let the foe be Mantinean, Olynthian, Epidaurian; let him come in elite units or hordes of shrieking rabble, crack citizen regiments or foreign mercenaries hired for gold. It made no difference. None was a match for the warriors of Lakedaemon, and all knew it.

Among the Spartans the work of war is demystified and depersonalized through its vocabulary, which is studded with references both agrarian and obscene. Their word which I translated earlier as “fuck,” as in the youths' tree-fucking, bears the connotation not so much of penetration as of grinding, like a miller's stone. The front three ranks “fuck” or “mill” the enemy. The verb “to kill,” in Doric
theros,
is the same as “to harvest.” The warriors in the fourth through sixth ranks are sometimes called “harvesters,” both for the work they do on the trampled enemy with the butt-spike “lizard-stickers” of their eight-footers and for that pitiless threshing stroke they make with the short
xiphos
sword, which itself is often called a “reaper.” To decapitate a man is to “top him off” or “give him a haircut.” Chopping off a hand or arm is called “limbing.”

Alexandros and I arrived at Rhion, at the bluff overlooking the army's embarkation port, a little after midnight of the third day. The port lights of Antirhion shone, clearly visible across the narrow strait. The embarkation beaches were already packed with men and boys, women and children, a thronging festive mob gathered to watch the spectacle of the fleet of galleys and coasters, conscripted merchantmen, ferries and even fishing boats assembled in advance by the allied Rhionians to transport the army in darkness west along the coast, out of sight of Antirhion, then across the gulf where it stood widest, some five miles down. Leonidas, respecting the sea-fighting reputation of the Antirhionians, had elected to make this passage at night.

Among the blufftop farewell-bawlers Alexandros and I located a boy our age whose father, he claimed, owned a fast smack and would not be averse to pocketing the wad of Attic drachmas clutched in Alexandros' fist in exchange for a swift silent crossing, no questions asked. The boy led us down through the crush of spectators and merrymakers to an obscure launching beach called the Ovens, behind an unlighted breakwater. Not twenty minutes after the last Spartan transport had cast off, we were on the water too, trailing the fleet out of sight to the west.

I fear the sea anytime, but never more than on a moonless night and in the hands of strangers. Our captain had insisted on bringing along his two brothers, though a man and a boy could easily handle the light swift craft. I have known these coasters and man jacks and mistrust them; the brothers, if indeed that's what they were, were hulking louts barely capable of speech, with beards so dense they began just below the eyeline and extended thick as fur to the matted pelts of their chests.

An hour passed. The smack was making far too much speed; across the dark water the plash of the transports' oarblades and even the creaking of looms against tholepins carried easily. Alexandros ordered the pirate twice to retard his progress, but the man tossed it off with a laugh. We were downwind, he said, no one could hear us, and even if they did they would take us for part of the convoy, or one of the spectator boats, trailing to catch the action.

Sure enough, as soon as the belly of the coastline had swallowed the lights of Rhion behind us, a Spartan cutter emerged out of the black and made way to intercept us. Doric voices hailed the smack and ordered her to heave-to. Suddenly our skipper demanded his money. When we land, Alexandros insisted, as agreed. The beards clamped oars in their fists like weapons. Cutter's getting closer, boys. How will it go with you if you're caught?

“Give him nothing, Alexandros,” I hissed.

But the boy perceived the precariousness of our predicament. “Of course, Captain. It will be my pleasure.”

The pirate accepted his fare, grinning like Charon on the ferry to hell. “Now, lads. Over the side with you.”

We were smack in the middle of the widest part of the gulf.

Our boatman indicated the Spartan cutter bearing swiftly down. “Catch a line and keep under the stern while I feed these lubbers a yard of shit.” The beards loomed. “Soon as we talk these fools off, we'll haul you back aboard none the worse for wear.”

Over we went. Up came the cutter. We heard the scrape of a knife blade through rope.

The line came off in our hands.

“Happy landings, lads!”

In a flash the smack's steering oar bit deep into the swell, the two worthless brutes suddenly showed themselves anything but. Three swift heaves on the driving oars and the smack shot off like a sling bullet.

We were cast adrift in the middle of the channel.

The cutter came up, calling after the smack as she sped from sight. The Spartans still hadn't seen us. Alexandros clamped my arm. We must not sing out, that would mean dishonor.

“I agree. Drowning's a lot more honorable.”

“Shut up.”

We held silent, treading water while the cutter quartered the area, scanning for other craft that might be spies. Finally she showed her stern and rowed off. We were alone beneath the stars.

As vast as the sea can look from the deck of a ship, it looks even bigger from a single handbreadth above the surface.

“Which shore do we make for?”

Alexandros gave me a look as if I had lost my senses. Of course we would go forward.

We paddled for what seemed like hours. The shore had not crawled one spear-length closer. “What if the current's against us? For all we know we're stuck here in place, or even drifting backward.”

“We're closer,” Alexandros insisted.

“Your eyes must be better than mine.”

There was nothing to do but paddle and pray. What monsters of the sea prowled at this moment beneath our feet, ready to snare our legs in their horrible coils, or shear us off at the kneecaps? I could hear Alexandros gulp water, fighting an asthmatic fit. We pulled closer together. Our eyes were gumming up from the salt; our arms felt like lead.

“Tell me a story,” Alexandros said.

For a moment I feared he was going mad.

“To encourage each other. Keep our spirits up. Tell me a story.”

I recited some verses from the
Iliad
which Bruxieus had made Diomache and me commit to memory, our second summer in the hills. I was getting the hexameters out of order but Alexandros didn't care; the words seemed to fortify him greatly.

“Dienekes says the mind is like a house with many rooms,” he said. “There are rooms one must not go into. To anticipate one's death is one of those rooms. We must not allow ourselves even to think it.”

He instructed me to continue, selecting only verses of valor. He declared that we must under no circumstances give thought to failure. “I think the gods may have dropped us here on purpose. To teach us about those rooms.”

We paddled on. Orion the Hunter had stood overhead when we began; now his arc descended, halfway down the sky. The shore stood as far off as ever.

“Do you know Agathe, Ariston's sister?” Alexandros asked out of nowhere. “I'm going to marry her. I've never told anyone that.”

“Congratulations.”

“You think I'm joking. But my thoughts have kept coming back to her for hours, or however long we've been out here.” He was serious. “Do you think she'll have me?”

It made as much sense to debate this in the middle of the ocean as anything else. “Your family outranks hers. If your father asks, hers will have to say yes.”

“I don't want her that way. You've watched her. Tell me the truth. Will she have me?”

I considered it. “She made you that amber charm. Her eyes never leave you when you sing. She comes out to the Big Ring with her sisters when we run. She pretends to be training, but she's really sneaking looks at you.”

This seemed to cheer Alexandros mightily. “Let's make a push. Twenty minutes as strong as we can, and see how far we can get.”

When we hit twenty, we decided to try for another.

“You have a girl you love too, don't you?” Alexandros asked as we paddled. “From your city. The girl you lived in the hills with, your cousin who went to Athens.”

I said it was impossible that he could know all that.

He laughed. “I know everything. I hear it from the girls and the goat boys and from your helot friend Dekton.” He said he wanted to know more about “this girl of yours.”

I told him I wouldn't tell him.

“I can help you to see her. My great-uncle is
proxenos
for Athens. He can have her found, and brought to the city if you wish.”

The swells were getting bigger; a cold wind had gotten up. We were going nowhere. I supported Alexandros again as another choking fit attacked him. He stuck his thumb between his teeth and bit through the flesh till it bled. The pain seemed to steady him. “Dienekes says that warriors advancing into battle must speak steadily and calmly to each other, each man encouraging his mate. We have to keep talking, Xeo.”

The mind plays tricks in conditions of such extremity. I cannot tell how much I spoke aloud to Alexandros over the succeeding hours and how much simply swam before memory's eye as we labored endlessly toward the shore that refused to come closer.

I know I told him of Bruxieus. If my knowledge of Homer were worthy, all credit lay with this fortune-cursed man, sightless as the poet himself, and his fierce will that I and my cousin not grow to adulthood wild and unlettered in the hills.

“This man was mentor to you,” Alexandros pronounced gravely, “as Dienekes is to me.” He wished to hear more. What was it like to lose mother and father, to watch your city burn? How long did you and your cousin remain in the hills? How did you get food, and how protect yourself from the elements and wild beasts?

In gulps and snatches, I told him.

         

B
y our second summer in the mountains, Diomache and I had become such accomplished hunters that not only did we no longer need to descend to town or farm for food, we no longer wished to. We were happy in the hills. Our bodies were growing. We had meat, not once or twice a month or on festival occasions only, as in our fathers' houses, but every day, with every meal. Here was our secret. We had found dogs.

Two puppies to be exact, runts of a disowned litter. Arkadian shepherd's hounds we had discovered shivering and suckling-blind, abandoned by their mother, who had untimely given birth in midwinter. We named one Happy and the other Lucky, and they were. By spring both had legs to run, and by summer their instincts had made them hunters. With those dogs our hungry days were over. We could track and kill anything that breathed. We could sleep with both eyes closed and know that nothing could take us unawares. We became such a proficient hunting team, Dio and I and the hounds, that we actually passed up opportunities, came upon game and let it go with the benevolence of gods. We feasted like lords and viewed the sweating valley farmers and plodding highland goatherds with contempt.