Gates of Fire (15 page)

Another factor, I knew, added to Rooster's frustration. He had just got his barnfriend (as the helot boys called their illicit wenches) pregnant. Soon he would be a father. How could he flee then? He would not abandon a child, nor could he make his getaway lugging a girl and a babe.

He stomped along, cursing one of the other herd boys who had let two goats stray, chasing the urchin back after these stragglers behind the herd. “Look at me,” he growled as he fell again into step beside me. “I can run as fast as any of these Spartan dick-strokers. I'm fourteen but I'll fight any twenty-year-old man-to-man and bring him down. Yet here I trudge, in this fool's nightshirt, holding the leash on a goat.”

He vowed he would steal a
xyele
and cut a Spartan's throat one day.

I told him he must not speak like this in my hearing.

“What'll you do? Report me?”

I wouldn't and he knew it.

“But by the gods,” I swore to him, “raise your hand once against them, any one of them, and I'll kill you.”

Rooster laughed. “Pluck a sharp stick from the roadside and drive it into your sockets, my friend. It couldn't make you any blinder than you are already.”

The army reached the frontier at Oion at nightfall of the second day, and Sparta herself twelve hours later. Runners had preceded the troops; the city had known for two days the identities of the wounded and the slain. Funeral games stood already in preparation; they would be celebrated within the fortnight.

That evening and the following day were consumed in decamping the battle train: cleaning and refitting weapons and armor, reshafting spears which had been shivered in combat and rewrighting the oaken hubs of the
hoplon
shields, disassembling and storing the riggings of the waggons, tending to the pack and draught animals, making sure each beast was properly watered and groomed and dispersed with their helot teamsters to their various
kleroi,
the farmsteads they worked. That second night, the Peers of the train at last returned to their messes.

This was customarily a solemn evening, in the aftermath of a battle, when fallen comrades were memorialized, acts of valor recognized and dishonorable conduct censured, when errors were reviewed and turned to instruction and the grave capital of battle stored up against future need.

The messes of the Peers are customarily havens of respite and confidentiality, sanctuaries within which all converse is privileged and private. Here after the long day friends may let down their hair among friends, speak as gentlemen the truths of their hearts and even, though never to excess, embrace the mellowing comfort of a bowl or two of wine.

This night, however, was not one for ease or conviviality. The souls of the twenty-eight perished hung heavily over the city. The secret shame of the warrior, the knowledge within his own heart that he could have done better, done more, done it more swiftly or with less self-preserving hesitation; this censure, always most pitiless when directed against oneself, gnawed unspoken and unrelieved at the men's guts. No decoration or prize of valor, not victory itself, could quell it entire.

“Well,” Polynikes called the youth Alexandros forward and addressed him sternly, “how did you like it?”

He meant war.

To be there, to see it raw and entire.

The evening stood now well advanced. The hour of the
epaikla
had expired, that second course of the meal at which game meat and wheaten bread may be contributed, and now the sixteen Peers of the Deukalion mess settled, hunger satisfied, upon their hardwood couches. Now the lads who stood-to the mess for their instruction might be summoned and roasted upon the griddle.

Alexandros was made to stand forth before his elders at the position of boy's attention, hands tucked from sight beneath the folds of his cloak, eyes glued to the floor as not yet worthy of rising to meet a Peer's full in the face.

“How did you enjoy the battle?” Polynikes queried.

“It made me sick,” Alexandros replied.

Under the interrogation the boy confessed that he had been unable to sleep since, neither aboard ship nor on the march home. If he closed his eyes even for a moment, he declared, he saw again with undiminished horror the scenes of slaughter, particularly the death spasm of his friend Meriones. His compassion, he acknowledged, was elicited as much by those casualties of the enemy as for the fallen heroes of his own city. Pressed hard upon this point, the boy declared the slaughter of war “barbarous and unholy.”

“Barbarous and unholy, is it?” responded Polynikes, darkening with anger.

The Peers in their messes are encouraged, when they deem it useful for the instruction of youth, to single out one lad, or even another Peer, and abuse him verbally in the most stern and pitiless fashion. This is called
arosis,
harrowing. Its purpose, much like the physical beatings, is to inure the senses to insult, to harden the will against responding with rage and fear, the twin unmanning evils of which that state called
katalepsis,
possession, is comprised. The prized response, the one the Peers look for, is humor. Deflect defamation with a joke, the coarser the better. Laugh in its face. A mind which can maintain its lightness will not come undone in war.

But Alexandros possessed no gift for the wisecrack. It wasn't in him. All he could do was answer in his clear pure voice with the most excruciating candor. I watched him from my service station at the left of the mess entrance, beneath the carven plaque—

         

Exo tes thyras ouden,

         

“Out this door nothing”—meaning no word spoken within these precincts may be repeated elsewhere.

It was a form of high courage which Alexandros displayed, to stand up to the Peers' hammering without a joke or a lie. At any time during a harrowing, the object boy may signal and call a stop. This is his right under the laws of Lykurgus. Pride, however, prevented Alexandros from exercising this option, and everyone knew it.

You wanted to see war, Polynikes began. What did you imagine it would be?

Alexandros was required to answer in the Spartan style, at once, with extreme brevity.

Your eyes were horror-stricken, your heart aggrieved at the sight of the manslaughter. Answer this:

What did you think a spear was for?

A shield?

A
xiphos
sword?

Questions of this kind would be put to the boy not in a harsh or abusive tone, which would have been easier to bear, but coldly, rationally, demanding a concisely expressed reasoned response. Alexandros was made to describe the wounds an eight-footer could produce and the types of deaths that would ensue. Should an overhand thrust be aimed at the throat or the chest? If the tendon of a foeman's calf be severed, should you pause to finish him off or press forward with the advance? If you plunge a spear into the groin above a man's testicles, should it be pulled straight out or ripped upward, blade vertical, to eviscerate the man's bowels? Alexandros' face flushed, his voice quaked and broke. Would you like to stop, boy? Is this instruction too much for you?

Answer concisely:

Can you envision a world without war?

Can you imagine clemency from an enemy?

Describe the condition of Lakedaemon without her army, without her warriors, to defend her.

Which is better, victory or defeat?

To rule or be ruled?

To make a widow of the enemy's wife or to have one's own wife widowed?

What is the supreme virtue of a man? Why? Whom of all in the city do you admire most? Why?

Define the word “mercy.” Define “compassion.” Are these the virtues of war or of peace? Of men or of women? Are they virtues at all?

Of the Peers who harrowed Alexandros this evening, Polynikes did not on the surface seem the most relentless or display the harshest severity. He did not lead the
arosis,
nor was his interrogation overtly cruel or malicious. He just wouldn't let it stop. In the tone of the other men's voices, no matter how ruthlessly they grilled Alexandros, resided at bottom the unspoken fundament of inclusion. Alexandros was of their blood, he was one of them; everything they did tonight and every other night was not to break his spirit or crush him like a slave, but to make him stronger, to temper his will and render him more worthy of being called warrior, as they were, of taking his place as a Spartiate and a Peer.

Polynikes' harrowing was different. There was something personal about it. He hated the boy, though it was impossible to guess why. What made it even more painful, to watch as it must have been to endure, was Polynikes' supreme physical beauty.

In every aspect of his person, face as well as physique, the Knight was formed as flawlessly as a god. Naked in the
Gymnasion,
even alongside scores of youths and warriors blessed in comeliness and elevated by their training to the peak of condition, Polynikes stood out, without equal, surpassing all others in symmetry of form and faultlessness of physical structure. Clothed in white robes for the Assembly, he shone like Adonis. And armed for war, with the bronze of his shield burnished, his scarlet cloak across his shoulders and the horsehair-crested helmet of a Knight pushed back upon his brow, he shone forth, peerless as Achilles.

To watch Polynikes train on the Big Ring, in preparation for the Games at Olympia or Delphi or Nemea, to behold him in the pastel light of day's end when he and the other sprinters had finished their distance work and now, under the eyes of their trainers, donned their racing armor for the final dressed sprints, even the most hardened Peers, training in the boxing oval or the wrestling pits, would pull up from their regimens and watch.

Four runners regularly trained with Polynikes: two brothers, Malineus and Gorgone, both victors at Nemea in the
diaulos
sprint; Doreion the Knight, who could outrun a racehorse over sixty meters; and Telamonias the boxer and
enomotarch
of the Wild Olive regiment.

The five would take their marks and a trainer would clap the start. For thirty meters, sometimes as long as fifty, the elite field remained a pack of straining bronze and flesh, laboring beneath the weight of their harness, and for a span of heartbeats the watching Peers would think, maybe this once, maybe this singular time, one will best him. Then from the fore, as the runners' accelerating power began to break the bonds of their burdens, Polynikes' churning shield would emerge, twenty pounds of oak and bronze sustained upon the pumping flesh and sinew of his left forearm; you saw his helmet flash; his polished greaves extended next, flying like the winged sandals of Hermes himself, and then, with a force and power so magnificent they stopped the heart, Polynikes would catapult out of the pack, blazing with such impossible swiftness that he seemed to be naked, even winged, and not belabored by the poundage upon his arm and across his back. Around the turning pole he flew. Daylight burst between him and his pursuers. He vaulted forward to the finish, four hundred meters total, no longer in his mind competing with these lesser fellows, these pedestrian mortals, any one of whom in another city would have been the object of adoration, mobbed by throngs of admirers, but who here, against this invincible runner, were doomed to eat dust and like it. This was Polynikes. No one could touch him. He possessed in every pore those blessings of feature and physique which the gods allow to combine in a single mortal only once in a generation.

Alexandros was beautiful too. Even with the broken nose Polynikes had gifted him with, his physical perfection approached that of the peerless runner. Perhaps this, in some way, lay at the root of the hatred the man felt for the boy. That he, Alexandros, whose joy lay in the chorus and not on the athletic field, was unworthy of this gift of beauty; that it, in him, failed to reflect the manly virtue, the
andreia,
which it in Polynikes so infallibly proclaimed.

My own suspicion was that the runner's animus was inflamed further by the favor Alexandros had found in Dienekes' eyes. For of all the men in the city with whom Polynikes competed in virtue and excellence, he resented most my master. Not so much for the honors Dienekes had been granted by his peers in battle, for Polynikes, like my master, had been awarded the prize of valor twice, and he was ten or twelve years younger.

It was something else, some less obvious aspect of character which Dienekes possessed and which the city honored him by recognizing, instinctively, without prompting or ceremony. Polynikes saw it in the way the young boys and girls joked with Dienekes when he passed their
sphairopaedia,
the ball-playing fields, during the noonday break. He caught it in the tilt of a smile from a matron and her maids at the springs or an old woman passing in the square. Even the helots granted my master a fondness and respect that were withheld from Polynikes, for all the heaps of honors that were his in other quarters. It galled him. Mystified him. He, Polynikes, had even produced two sons, while Dienekes' issue were all female, four daughters who, unless Arete could produce a son, would extinguish his line altogether, while Polynikes' strapping swift lads would one day be warriors and men. That Dienekes wore the respect of the city so lightly and with such self-effacing wit was even more bitter to Polynikes.

For the runner saw in Dienekes neither beauty of form nor fleetness of foot. Instead he perceived a quality of mind, a power of self-possession, which he himself, for all the gifts the gods had lavished upon him, could not call his own. Polynikes' courage was that of a lion or an eagle, something in the blood and the marrow, which summoned itself out of its own preeminence, without thought, and gloried in its instinctual supremacy.

Dienekes' courage was different. His was the virtue of a man, a fallible mortal, who brought valor forth out of the understanding of his heart, by the force of some inner integrity which was unknown to Polynikes. Was this why he hated Alexandros? Was it why he had splintered the boy's nose that evening of the eight-nighter? Polynikes sought to break more than the youth's face now. Here in the mess he wanted to crack him, to see him come apart.