Gates of Fire (5 page)

Tripod managed to lift himself upon all fours. Blood was sheeting from his mouth, nose and ears. He could not see or speak. He managed somehow to turn about and almost stand, then he sank slowly to his seat, held there a moment and then dropped, hard, into the dirt. It was clear at once that he would never rise.

Later that evening when it was over (the ritual was not suspended on account of Tripod's death but continued for another three hours), Dienekes, who had been present, walked apart with his protege, the boy Alexandros whom I mentioned earlier. I served Alexandros at this time. He was twelve but looked no older than ten; already he was a wonderful runner, but extremely slight and of a sensitive disposition. Moreover he had shared a bond of affection with Tripod; the older boy had been a sort of guardian or protector; Alexandros was devastated by his death.

Dienekes walked with Alexandros, alone except for his own squire and myself, to a spot beneath the temple of Athena Protectress of the City, immediately below the slope from the statue of Phobos, the god of fear. At that time Dienekes' age was, I would estimate, thirty-five years. He had already won two prizes of valor, at Erythrae against the Thebans and at Achillieon against the Corinthians and their Arkadian allies. As nearly as I can recall, this is how the older man instructed his protege:

First, in a gentle and loving tone, he recalled his own first sight, when he was a lad in years younger even than Alexandros, of a boy comrade whipped to death. He recounted several of his own ordeals in the Runway, beneath the rod.

Then he began the sequence of query and response which comprises the Lakedaemonian syllabus of instruction.

“Answer this, Alexandros. When our countrymen triumph in battle, what is it that defeats the foe?”

The boy responded in the terse Spartan style, “Our steel and our skill.”

“These, yes,” Dienekes corrected him gently, “but something more. It is that.” His gesture led up the slope to the image of Phobos.

Fear.

Their own fear defeats our enemies.

“Now answer. What is the source of fear?”

When Alexandros' reply faltered, Dienekes reached with his hand and touched his own chest and shoulder.

“Fear arises from this: the flesh. This,” he declared, “is the factory of fear.”

Alexandros listened with the grim concentration of a boy who knows his whole life will be war; that the laws of Lykurgus forbid him and every other Spartan to know or pursue a trade other than war; that his term of obligation extends from age twenty to age sixty, and that no force under heaven will excuse him from soon, very soon, assuming his place in line of battle and clashing shield-to-shield, helmet-to-helmet with the enemy.

“Now answer again, Alexandros. Did you observe today in the manner of the
eirenes
delivering the beating any sign or indication of malice?”

The boy answered no.

“Would you characterize their demeanor as barbarous? Did they take pleasure in dealing agony to Tripod?”

No.

“Was their intention to crush his will or break his spirit?”

No.

“What was their intention?”

“To harden his mind against pain.”

Throughout this conversation the older man maintained a voice tender and solicitous with love. Nothing Alexandros could do would ever make this voice love him less or abandon him. Such is the peculiar genius of the Spartan system of pairing each boy in training with a mentor other than his own father. A mentor may say things that a father cannot; a boy can confess to his mentor that which would bring shame to reveal to his father.

“It was bad today, wasn't it, my young friend?”

Dienekes then asked the boy how he imagined battle, real battle, compared with what he had witnessed today.

No answer was required or expected.

“Never forget, Alexandros, that this flesh, this body, does not belong to us. Thank God it doesn't. If I thought this stuff was mine, I could not advance a pace into the face of the enemy. But it is not ours, my friend. It belongs to the gods and to our children, our fathers and mothers and those of Lakedaemon a hundred, a thousand years yet unborn. It belongs to the city which gives us all we have and demands no less in requital.”

Man and boy moved on, down the slope to the river. They followed the path to that grove of double-boled myrtle called the Twins, sacred to the sons of Tyndareus and to the family to which Alexandros belonged. It would be to this spot, on the night of his final ordeal and initiation, that he would repair, alone save his mother and sisters, to receive the salve and sanction of the gods of his line.

Dienekes sat upon the earth beneath the Twins. He gestured to Alexandros to take the place beside him.

“Personally I think your friend Tripod was foolish. What he displayed today contained more of recklessness than true courage,
andreia.
He cost the city his life, which could have been spent more fruitfully in battle.”

Nonetheless it was clear Dienekes respected him.

“But to his credit he showed us something of nobility today. He showed you and every boy watching what it is to pass beyond identification with the body, beyond pain, beyond fear of death. You were horrified to behold his
agonisma,
but it was awe that struck you truly, wasn't it? Awe of that boy or whatever
daimon
animated him. Your friend Tripod showed us contempt for this.” Again Dienekes indicated the flesh. “A contempt which approached the stature of the sublime.”

From my spot, above on the bank, I could see the boy's shoulders shudder as the grief and terror of the day at last purged themselves from his heart. Dienekes embraced and comforted him. When at last the boy had recomposed himself, his mentor gently released him.

“Have your instructors taught you why the Spartans excuse without penalty the warrior who loses his helmet or breastplate in battle, but punish with loss of all citizenship rights the man who discards his shield?”

They had, Alexandros replied.

“Because a warrior carries helmet and breastplate for his own protection, but his shield for the safety of the whole line.”

Dienekes smiled and placed a hand upon his protege's shoulder.

“Remember this, my young friend. There is a force beyond fear. More powerful than self-preservation. You glimpsed it today, in a crude and unself-aware form, yes. But it was there and it was genuine. Let us remember your friend Tripod and honor him for this.”

         

I
was screaming upon the hide board. I could hear my cries bounce off the walls of the livestock enclosure and shriek off, multiplied, up the hillsides. I knew it was disgraceful but I could not stop.

I begged the farm men to release me, to end my agony. I would do anything, and I described it all at the top of my lungs. I cried out to the gods in a shameful little boy's voice piping up the mountainside. I knew Bruxieus could hear me. Would his love for me impel him to dash in and be nailed alongside me? I didn't care. I wanted the pain to end. I begged the men to kill me. I could feel the bones in both hands shattered by the spikes. I would never hold a spear or even a gardening spade. I would be a cripple, a clubfist. My life was over and in the meanest, most dishonorable way.

A fist shattered my cheek. “Shut your pipehole, you sniveling little shitworm!” The men set the tanning board upright, angled against a wall, and there I squirmed, impaled, for the sun's endless crawl across the sky. Urchins from the up-valley farms clustered to watch me scream. The girls tore my rags and poked at my privates; the boys pissed on me. Dogs snuffed my bare soles, emboldening themselves to make a meal of me. I only stopped wailing when my throat could cry no longer. I was trying to tear my palms free right through the spikes, but the men lashed my wrists tighter so I couldn't move. “How does that feel, you fucking thief? Let's see you pick off another prize, you night-creeping little rat.”

When at last their own growling bellies drove my tormentors indoors for supper, Diomache slipped down from the hill and cut me free. The spikes would not come out of my palms; she had to blade the wood off the frame with her dagger. My hands came away with the tanning nails still through them. Bruxieus carried me off, as he had borne Diomache earlier, after her violation.

“Oh God,” my cousin said when she saw my hands.

SIX

T
hat winter, Bruxieus said, was the coldest he could remember. Sheep froze in the high pastures. Twenty-foot drifts sealed the passes. Deer were driven so desperate with hunger that they straggled down, skeleton-thin and blind from starvation, all the way to the shepherds' winter folds, where they presented themselves for slaughter, point-blank before the herdsmen's bows.

We stayed in the mountains, so high up that martens' and foxes' fur grew white as the snow. We slept in dugouts that shepherds had abandoned or in ice caves we chopped out with stone axes, lining their floors with pine boughs and huddling together beneath our triple cloaks in a pile like puppies. I begged Bruxieus and Diomache to abandon me, let me die in peace in the cold. They insisted that I allow them to carry me down to a town, to a physician. I refused absolutely. Never again would I place myself before a stranger, any stranger, without a weapon in my hand. Did Bruxieus imagine that doctors possessed a more exalted sense of honor than other men? What payment would some hill-town quack demand? What profitable turn would he discover in a slave and a crippled boy? What use would he make of a starving thirteen-year-old girl?

I had another reason for refusing to go to a town. I hated myself for the shameless way I had cried out, and could not make myself stop, during the hours I was put to the trial. I had seen my own heart and it was the heart of a coward. I despised myself with a blistering, pitiless scorn. The tales I had cherished of the Spartans only made me loathe myself more. None of them would beg for his life as I had, absent every scrap of dignity. The dishonor of my parents' murder continued to torment me. Where was I in their hour of desperation? I was not there when they needed me. In my mind I imagined their slaughter again and again, and always myself absent. I wanted to die. The only thought that lent me solace was the certainty that I would die, soon, and thereby exit this hell of my own dishonored existence.

Bruxieus intuited these thoughts and tried in his gentle way to disarm them. I was only a child, he told me. What prodigies of valor could be expected from a lad of ten? “Boys are men at ten in Sparta,” I declared.

This was the first and only time I saw Bruxieus truly, physically angry. He seized me by both shoulders and shook me violently, commanding me to face him. “Listen to me, boy. Only gods and heroes can be brave in isolation. A man may call upon courage only one way, in the ranks with his brothers-in-arms, the line of his tribe and his city. Most piteous of all states under heaven is that of a man alone, bereft of the gods of his home and his
polis.
A man without a city is not a man. He is a shadow, a shell, a joke and a mockery. That is what you have become now, my poor Xeo. No one may expect valor from one cast out alone, cut off from the gods of his home.”

He drew up then; his eyes broke away in sorrow. I saw the slave brand upon his brow. I understood. Such was the state he had endured, all these years, in the house of my father. “But you have acted the man, little old uncle,” I said, employing the fondest Astakiot term of affection. “How have you done it?”

He looked at me with sad, gentle eyes. “The love I might have given my own children, I gave to you, little nephew. That was my answer to the unknowable ways of God. But it seems the Argives are dearer to Him than I. He has let them rob me of my life not once, but twice.”

These words, intended to bring comfort, only reinforced further my resolve to die. My hands had swollen now to twice their normal size. Pus and poison oozed from them, then froze in a hideous icy mass that I had to chip away each morning to reveal the mangled flesh beneath. Bruxieus did everything he could with salves and poultices, but it was no use. Both central metacarpals had been shattered in my right hand. I could not close the fingers nor form a fist. I would never hold a spear nor grip a sword. Diomache sought to comfort me by equating my ruin to hers. I scorned her bitterly. “You can still be a woman. What can I do? How can I ever take my place in the line of battle?”

At night, bouts of fever alternated with fits of teeth-rattling ague. I curled contorted in Diomache's arms, with Bruxieus' bulk enwrapping us both for warmth. I called out again and again to the gods but received no whisper in reply. They had abandoned us, it was clear, now that we no longer possessed ourselves or were possessed by our
polis.

One fever-racked night, perhaps ten days after the incident at the farmstead, Diomache and Bruxieus wrapped me in skins and set off foraging. It had begun to snow and they hoped to use the silence, perhaps with luck to take unawares a hare or a gone-to-ground covey of grouse.

This was my chance. I resolved to take it. I waited till Bruxieus and Diomache had moved off beyond sight and sound. Leaving cloak and furs and foot wraps behind for them, I set out barefoot into the storm.

I climbed for what seemed like hours but was probably no more than five minutes. The fever had me in its grip. I was blind like the deer, yet guided by an infallible sense of direction. I found a place amid a stand of pines and knew this was my spot. A profound sense of decorum possessed me. I wanted to do this properly and, above all, to be no trouble to Bruxieus and Diomache.

I picked out a tree and settled my back against it so that its spirit, which touched both earth and sky, would conduct mine safely out of this world. Yes, this was the tree. I could feel Sleep, brother of Death, advancing up from the toes. Feeling ebbed from my loins and midsection. When the numbness reaches the heart, I imagined, I will pass over. Then a terrifying thought struck me.

What if this is the wrong tree? Perhaps I should be leaning against that one. Or that other, over there. A panic of indecision seized me. I was in the wrong spot! I had to get up but could no longer command my limbs to move. I groaned. I was failing even in my own death. Just as my panic and despair reached their apex, I was startled to discover a man standing directly above me in the grove!

My first thought was that he could help me move. He could advise me. Help me decide. Together we would pick out the correct tree and he would place my back against it. From some part of my mind the numb thought arose: what is a man doing up here at this hour, in this storm?

I blinked and tried with all my failing power to focus. No, this was not a dream. Whoever this was, he was really here. The thought came foggily that he must be a god. It occurred to me that I was acting impiously toward him. I was giving offense. Surely propriety demanded that I respond with terror or awe, or prostrate myself before him. Yet something in his posture, which was not grave but oddly whimsical, seemed to say, Don't give yourself the bother. I accepted this. It seemed to please him. I knew he was going to speak, and that whatever words came forth would be of paramount importance for me, in this my earthly life or the life I was about to pass into. I must listen with all my faculties and forget nothing.

His eyes met mine with a gentle, amused kindness.

“I have always found the spear to be,” he spoke with a quiet majesty that could be nothing other than the voice of a god, “a rather inelegant weapon.”

What a queer thing to say, I thought.

And why “inelegant”? I had the sense that the word was absolutely deliberate, the one precise term the god sought. It seemed to carry significance for him in level upon level, though I myself had no idea what this meaning could be. Then I saw the silver bow slung over his shoulder.

The Archer.

Apollo Far Striker.

In a flash that was neither thunderbolt nor revelation but the plainest, least adorned apprehension in the world, I understood all that his words and presence implied. I knew what he meant, and what I must do.

My right hand. Its severed sinews would never produce the warrior's grasp upon the shank of a spear. But its forefingers could catch and draw the twined gut of a bowstring. My left, though ever denied power to close upon the gripcord of a
hoplon
shield, could yet hold stable the handpiece of a bow and extend it to full stretch.

The bow.

The bow would preserve me.

The Archer's eyes probed mine, gently, for one final instant. Had I understood? His glance seemed to inquire not so much “Will you now serve me?” as to confirm the fact, unknown to me heretofore, that I had been in his service all my life.

I felt warmth returning to my midsection and the blood surging like a tide into my legs and feet. I heard my name being called from below and knew it was my cousin, she and Bruxieus in alarm, scouring the hillside for me.

Diomache reached me, scrabbling over the snowy crest and lurching into the grove of pines. “What are you doing up here all alone?” I could feel her slapping my cheeks, hard, as if to bring me around from a vision or transport; she was crying, clutching and hugging me, tearing off her cloak to wrap about me. She called back to Bruxieus, who in his blindness was clambering as fast as he could up the slope below.

“I'm all right,” I heard my voice assuring her. She slapped me again and then, weeping, cursed me for being such a fool and scaring them so to death. “It's all right, Dio,” I heard my voice repeating. “I'm all right.”