Gates of Fire (33 page)

TWENTY-NINE

H
is Majesty knows far better than I the details of the intrigue by which the ultimate betrayal of the allies was effected; that is, who the traitor was of the Trachinian natives who came forward to inform His Majesty's commanders of the existence of the mountain track by which the Hot Gates could be encircled, and what reward was paid this criminal from the treasury of Persia.

The Greeks drew hints of this calamitous intelligence first from the omens taken on the morning of the second day's fighting, corroborated further by rumors and reports of deserters throughout the day, and ultimately confirmed by eyewitness testimony upon that evening, the end of the allies' sixth in possession of the pass of Thermopylae.

A nobleman of the enemy had come over to the Greek lines at the time of the changing of the first watch, approximately two hours after the cessation of the day's hostilities. He identified himself as Tyrrhastiadas of Kyme, a captain-of-a-thousand in the conscripted forces of that nation. This prince was the tallest, best-looking and most magnificently appareled personage of the enemy who had thus far deserted. He addressed the assembly in errorless Greek. His wife was a Hellene of Hallicarnassus, he declared; that, and the compulsion of honor, had impelled him to cross over to the allied lines. He informed the Spartan king that he had been present before Xerxes' pavilion this very evening when the traitor, whose name I have learned but here and evermore refuse to repeat, had come forward to claim the reward offered by His Majesty and to volunteer his services in guiding the forces of Persia along the secret track.

The noble Tyrrhastiadas went on to report that he had personally observed the issuance by His Majesty of the orders of march and the marshaling of the Persian battalions. The Immortals, their losses replaced and now numbering again their customary ten thousand, had set out at nightfall under command of their general, Hydarnes. They were on the march at this very moment, led by their traitor guide. They would be in the allied rear, in position to attack, by dawn.

His Majesty, cognizant of the catastrophic consequence for the Greeks of this betrayal, may marvel at their response in assembly to the timely and fortuitous warning delivered by the noble Tyrrhastiadas.

They didn't believe him.

They thought it was a trick.

Such an irrational and self-deluding response may be understood only in the light not alone of the exhaustion and despair which had by that hour overwhelmed the allies' hearts but by the corresponding exaltation and contempt of death, which are, like the mated faces of a coin, their obverse and concomitant.

The first day's fighting had produced acts of extraordinary valor and heroism.

The second began to spawn marvels and prodigies.

Most compelling of all was the simple fact of survival. How many times amid the manslaughter of the preceding forty-eight hours had each warrior stood upon the instant of his own extinction? Yet still he lived. How many times had the masses of the foe in numbers overwhelming assaulted the allies with unstoppable might and valor? Yet still the front had held.

Three times on that second day the lines of the defenders teetered upon the point of buckling. His Majesty beheld the moment, immediately before nightfall, when the Wall itself stood breached and the massed myriads of the Empire clambered upon and over the stones, vaunting their victory cry. Yet somehow the Wall stood; the pass did not fall.

All day long, that second of battle, the fleets had clashed off Skiathos in mirrored reflection of the armies at the Gates. Beneath the bluffs of Artemisium the navies hammered each other, driving bronze ram against sheathed timber as their brothers contended steel against steel upon land. The defenders of the pass beheld the burning hulks, smudges against the horizon, and closer in, the flotsam of staved-in beams and spars, shivered oars and sailors' bodies facedown in the shore current. It seemed that Greek and Persian contended no longer as antagonists, but rather had entered, both sides, into some perverse pact whose aim was neither victory nor salvation, but merely to incarnadine earth and ocean with their intermingled blood. The very heavens appeared that day not as a peopled realm, assigning by their witness meaning to events below, but rather as a blank unholy face of slate, compassionless and indifferent. The mountain wall of Kallidromos overstanding the carnage seemed beyond all to embody this bereavement of pity in the featureless face of its silent stone. All creatures of the air had fled. No sign of green shoot lingered upon the earth nor within the clefts of rock.

Only the dirt itself possessed clemency. Alone the stinking soup beneath the warriors' tread proffered surcease and succor. The men's feet churned it into broth ankle-deep; their driving legs furrowed it to the depth of the calf, then they themselves fell upon it on their knees and fought from there. Fingers clawed at the blood-blackened muck, toes strained against it for purchase, the teeth of dying men bit into it as if to excavate their own graves with the clamp of their jaws. Farmers whose hands had taken up with pleasure the dark clods of their native fields, crumbling between their fingers the rich earth which brings forth the harvest, now crawled on their bellies in this sterner soil, clawed at it with the nubs of their busted fingers and writhed without shame, seeking to immure themselves within earth's mantle and preserve their backs from the pitiless steel.

In the
palaistrai
of Hellas, the Greeks love to wrestle. From the time a boy can stand, he grapples with his mates, dusted with grit in pits of sand or oiled with ooze in rings of mud. Now the Hellenes wrestled in less holy precincts, where the sluice pail held not water but blood, where the prize was death and the umpire spurned all calls for stay or quarter. One witnessed again and again in the battles of the second day a Hellenic warrior fight for two hours straight, retire for ten minutes, without taking food and gulping only a cupped handful of water, then return to the fray for another two-hour round. Again and again one saw a man receive a blow that shattered the teeth within his jaw or split the bone of his shoulder yet did not make him fall.

On the second day I saw Alpheus and Maron take out six men of the foe so fast that the last two were dead before the first pair hit the ground. How many did the brothers slay that day? Fifty? A hundred? It would have taken more than an Achilles among the foe to bring them down, not solely in consequence of their strength and skill but because they were two who fought with a single heart.

All day His Majesty's champions came on, advancing in wave after wave with no interval to distinguish between nations or contingents. The rotation of forces which the allies had employed on the first day became impossible. Companies of their own will refused to forsake the line. Squires and servants took up the arms of the fallen and assumed their places in the breach.

No longer did men waste breath to cheer or rally one another to pride or valor. No more did warriors exult or vaunt their hearts in triumph. Now in the intervals of respite these simply fell, wordless and numb, into heaps of the unstrung and the undone. In the lee of the Wall, upon every hollow of sundered earth, one beheld knots of warriors shattered by fatigue and despair, eight or ten, twelve or twenty, dropped where they fell, in unmoving postures of horror and grief. None spoke or stirred. Instead the eyes of each stared without sight into inexpressible realms of private horror.

Existence had become a tunnel whose walls were death and within which prevailed no hope of rescue or deliverance. The sky had ceased to be, and the sun and stars. All that remained was the earth, the churned riven dirt which seemed to wait at each man's feet to receive his spilling guts, his shattered bones, his blood, his life. The earth coated every part of him. It was in his ears and nostrils, in his eyes and throat, under his nails and in the crease of his backside. It coated the sweat and salt of his hair; he spat it from his lungs and blew it slick with snot from his nose.

There is a secret all warriors share, so private that none dare give it voice, save only to those mates drawn dearer than brothers by the shared ordeal of arms. This is the knowledge of the hundred acts of his own cowardice. The little things that no one sees. The comrade who fell and cried for aid. Did I pass him by? Choose my skin over his? That was my crime, of which I accuse myself in the tribunal of my heart and there condemn myself as guilty.

All a man wants is to live. This before all: to cling to breath. To survive.

Yet even this most primal of instincts, self-preservation, even this necessity of the blood shared by all beneath heaven, beasts as well as man, even this may be worn down by fatigue and excess of horror. A form of courage enters the heart which is not courage but despair and not despair but exaltation. On that second day, men passed beyond themselves. Feats of heart-stopping valor fell from the sky like rain, and those who performed them could not even recall, nor state with certainty, that the actors had been themselves.

I saw a squire of the Philiasians, no more than a boy, take up his master's armor and wade into the manslaughter. Before he could strike a blow, a Persian javelin shattered his shin, driving straight through the bone. One of his mates rushed to the lad to bind his gushing artery and drag him to safety. The youth beat back his savior with the flat of his sword. He hobbled upon his spear used as a crutch, then on his knees, into the fray, still hacking at the foe from the earth where he perished.

Other squires and servants seized iron pegs and, themselves unshod and unarmored, scaled the mountain face above the Narrows, hammering the pins into cracks of rock to secure themselves, from these exposed perches hurling stones and boulders down upon the foe. The Persian archers turned these boys into pincushions; their bodies dangled crucified from pitons or tumbled from their fingerholds to crash upon the roiling slaughter below.

The merchant Elephantinos dashed into the open to save one of these lads yet living, hung up on a ledge above the rear of battle. A Persian arrow tore the old man's throat out; he fell so fast he seemed to vanish straight into the earth. Fierce fighting broke out over his corpse. Why? He was no king or officer, only a stranger who tended the young men's wounds and made them laugh with “Weck up to thees!”

Night had nearly fallen. The Hellenes were reeling from casualties and exhaustion, while the Persians continued pouring fresh champions into the fray. Those in the foe's rear were being driven onward by the whips of their own officers; these pressed with zeal upon their fellows, driving them forward into the Greeks.

Does His Majesty remember? A violent squall had broken then over the sea; rain began sheeting in torrents. By this point most of the allies' weapons had been spent or broken. The warriors had gone through a dozen spears apiece; none yet bore his own shield, which had been staved in long since; he defended himself with the eighth and tenth he had snatched from the ground. Even the Spartans' short
xiphos
swords had been sundered from excess of blows. The steel blades held, but the hafts and grips had come undone. Men were fighting with stubs of iron, thrusting with shivered half-spears bereft of warhead and butt-spike.

The host of the foe had hacked their way forward, within a dozen paces of the Wall. Only the Spartans and Thespaians remained before this battlement, all others of the allies having been beaten back behind or upon it. The massed myriads of the enemy extended all the way from the Narrows, flooding at will across the hundred-yard triangle before the Wall.

The Spartans fell back. I found myself beside Alexandros atop the Wall, hauling one man after another up and over, while the allies rained javelins and shivered spears, stones and boulders and even helmets and shields down upon the onpressing foe.

The allies cracked and reeled. Back they fell in a disordered mass, fifty feet, a hundred, beyond the Wall. Even the Spartans withdrew in disorder, my master, Polynikes, Alpheus and Maron themselves, shattered by wounds and exhaustion.

The enemy literally tore the stones from the face of the Wall. Now the tide of their multitude flooded over the toppled ruins, skidding down the stadium steps of the Wall's rear onto the open earth before the unprotected camps of the allies. Vanquishment was moments away when for cause inexplicable, the foe, with victory before him in his palm, pulled up in fear and could not find courage to press home the kill.

The enemy drew up, seized by a terror without source or signature.

What force had unmanned their hearts and robbed them of valor, no faculty of reason may divine. It may have been that the warriors of the Empire could not credit the imminence of their own triumph. Perhaps they had been fighting for so long on the foreside of the Wall that their senses could not embrace the reality of at last achieving the breach.

Whatever it was, the foe's momentum faltered. A moment of unearthly stillness seized the field.

Suddenly from the heavens a bellow of unearthly power, as that from the throats of fifty thousand men, pealed through the aether. The hair stood straight up on my neck; I spun toward Alexandros; he, too, held rooted, paralyzed in awe and terror, as every other man upon the field.

A bolt of almighty magnitude slammed overhead into the wall of Kallidromos. Thunder boomed, great stones blew from the cliff face; smoke and sulphur rent the air. On rolled that unearthly cry, nailing all in place with terror save Leonidas, who now strode to the fore with upraised spear.

“Zeus Savior!” the king's voice rose into the thunder. “Hellas and freedom!”

He cried the
paean
and rushed forward upon the foe. Fresh courage flooded the allies' hearts; they roared into the counterattack. Back over the Wall the enemy tumbled in panic at this prodigy of heaven. I found myself again atop its slick and sundered stones, firing shaft after shaft into the mass of Persians and Bactrians, Medes and Illyrians, Lydians and Egyptians, stampeding in flight below.