Gates of Fire (9 page)

Now a second factor entered the equation. This was the tendency among the youths in training, those who were not for the moment the object of their superiors' rage, to convulse with perverse glee at the misery of whatever luckless mate now found himself spitted above the coals. Up and down the line of boys, teeth sank into tongues seeking to suppress this fear-inspired hilarity. One lad named Ariston, who was extremely handsome and the fastest sprinter of the fourth class, something of a younger version of Polynikes himself, could not contain himself. A snort escaped his clamped jaws.

Polynikes turned upon him in fury. Ariston had three sisters, all what the Lakedaemonians call “two-lookers,” meaning they were so pretty that one look was not enough, you had to look twice to appreciate them.

Polynikes asked Ariston if he thought this was funny.

“No, lord,” the boy replied.

“If you think this is funny, wait till you get into combat. You'll think that's hysterical.”

“No, lord.”

“Oh yes you will. You'll be giggling like your goddam sisters.” He advanced a pace nearer. “Is that what you think war is, you fucking come-spot?”

“No, lord.”

Polynikes pressed his face inches from the boy's, glowering into his eyes with a look of blistering malice. “Tell me. Which do you think will be the bigger laugh: when you take an enemy spear eighteen inches up the dogblossom, or when your psalm-singing mate Alexandros takes one?”

“Neither, lord.” Ariston's face was stone.

“You're afraid of me, aren't you? That's the real reason you're laughing. You're so fucking happy it wasn't you I singled out.”

“No, lord.”

“What? You're not afraid of me?”

Polynikes demanded to know which it was. Because if Ariston was afraid of him, then he was a coward. And if he wasn't, he was reckless and ignorant, which was even worse.

“Which is it, you miserable mound of shit? 'Cause you'd better fucking well be afraid of me. I'll put my dick in your right ear, pull it out your left and fill that chamber pot myself.”

Polynikes ordered the other boys to take up Alexandros' slack. While their pathetic dribbles of urine splotched onto the wood and leather-padded frame, over the good-luck talismans that Alexandros' mother and sisters had made and that hung from the inner frame, Polynikes returned his attention to Alexandros, querying him on the protocol of the shield, which the boy knew and had known since he was three.

The shield must stand upright at all times, Alexandros declaimed at the top of his voice, with its forearm sleeve and handgrip at the ready. If a warrior stand at the rest, his shield must lean against his knees. If he sit or lie, it must be supported upright by the
tripous basis,
a light three-legged stand which all bore inside the bowl of the concave
hoplon,
in a carrying nest made for that purpose.

The other youths under Polynikes' orders had now finished urinating as best they could into the hollow of Alexandros' shield. I glanced at Dienekes. His features betrayed no emotion, though I knew he loved Alexandros and wished for nothing more than to dash down the slope and murder Polynikes.

But Polynikes was right. Alexandros was wrong. The boy must be taught a lesson.

Polynikes now had Alexandros'
tripous basis
in his hand. The little tripod was comprised of three dowels joined at one end by a leather thong. The dowels were the thickness of a man's finger and about eighteen inches long. “Line of battle!” Polynikes bellowed. The platoon of boys formed up. He had them all lay their shields, defamed, facedown in the dirt, exactly as Alexandros had done.

By now twelve hundred Spartiates up the hill were observing the spectacle, along with an equal number of squires and helot attendants.

“Shields, port!”

The boys lunged for their heavy, grounded
hopla.
As they did, Polynikes lashed at Alexandros' face with the tripod. Blood sprung. He swatted the next boy and the next until the fifth at last wrestled his twenty-pound, unwieldy shield off the ground and up into place to defend himself.

He made them do it again and again and again.

Starting at one end of the line, then the other, then the middle. Polynikes, as I have said, was an Agiad, one of the Three Hundred Knights and an Olympic victor besides. He could do anything he liked. The drill instructor, who was just an
eirene,
had been brushed aside, and could do nothing but look on in mortification.

“This is hilarious, isn't it?” Polynikes demanded of the boys. “I'm beside myself, aren't you? I can hardly wait to see combat, which will be even more fun.”

The youths knew what was coming next.

Tree fucking.

When Polynikes tired of torturing them here, he would have their drill instructor march them over to the edge of the plain, to some particularly stout oak, and order them, in formation, to push the tree down with their shields, just the way they would assault an enemy in battle.

The boys would take station in ranks, eight deep, the shield of each pressed into the hollow of the boy's back before him, with the leading boy's shield mashed by their combined weight and pressure against the oak. Then they would do
othismos
drill.

They would push.

They would strain.

They would fuck that tree for all they were worth.

The soles of their bare feet would churn the dirt, heaving and straining until a rut had been excavated ankle-deep, while they crushed each other's guts humping and hurling, grinding into that unmoveable trunk. When the front-rank boy could stand no more, he would assume the position of the rearmost and the second boy would move up.

Two hours later Polynikes would casually return, perhaps with several other young warriors, who had themselves been through this hell more than once during their own
agoge
years. These would observe with shock and disbelief that the tree was still standing. “By God, these dog-strokers have been at it half the watch and that pitiful little sapling is still right where it was!”

Now effeminacy would be added to the list of the lads' crimes. It was unthinkable that they be allowed to return to the city while this tree yet defied them; such failure would disgrace their fathers and mothers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins, all the gods and heroes of their line, not to mention their hounds, cats, sheep and goats and even the rats in their helots' barns, who would hang their heads and have to slink off to Athens or some other rump-split
polis
where men were men and knew how to put out a respectable fucking.

That tree is the enemy!

Fuck the enemy!

On it would go, into all-night shield drill which by mid second watch would have reduced the boys to involuntary regurgitation and defecation; they would be puking and shitting themselves, their bodies shattered utterly from exhaustion, and then, when the dawn sacrifices at last brought clemency and reprieve, the boys would fall in for another full day of training without a minute's sleep.

This torment, the boys knew now as they stood under Polynikes face-lashing, was yet to come. This was what they had to look forward to.

By this point every nose in the formation had been broken. Each boy's face was a sheet of blood. Polynikes was just taking a breath (he had tired his arm with all that swatting) when Alexandros thoughtlessly reached with a hand to the side of his blood-begrimed face.

“What do you think you're doing, buttfuck?” Polynikes turned instantly upon him.

“Wiping the blood, lord.”

“What are you doing that for?”

“So I can see, lord.”

“Who the fuck told you you had a right to see?”

Polynikes continued his blistering mockery. Why did Alexandros think the division was out here, training at night? Was it not to learn to fight when they couldn't see? Did Alexandros think that in combat he would be allowed to pause to wipe his face? That must be it. Alexandros would call out to the enemy and they would halt politely for a moment, so the boy could pluck a nosenugget from his nostril or wipe a turdberry from his crease. “I ask you again, is this a chamber pot?”

“No, lord. It is my shield.”

Again Polynikes' dowels blasted the boy across the face. “‘My'?” he demanded furiously. “‘My'?”

Dienekes looked on, mortified, from where he stood at the edge of the upper camp. Alexandros was excruciatingly aware that his mentor was watching; he seemed to summon his composure, rally all his senses. The boy stepped forward, shield at high port. He straightened to attention before Polynikes and enunciated in his loudest, clearest voice:

“This is my shield.

I bear it before me into battle,

but it is not mine alone.

It protects my brother on my left.

It protects my city.

I will never let my brother

out of its shadow

nor my city out of its shelter.

I will die with my shield before me

facing the enemy.”

The boy finished. The last of his words, shouted at the top of his voice, echoed for a long moment around the valley walls. Twenty-five hundred men stood listening and watching.

They could see Polynikes nod, satisfied. He barked an order. The boys resumed formation, each now with his shield in proper place, upright against its owner's knees.

“Shields, port!”

The boys lunged for their
hopla.

Polynikes swung the tripod.

With a crack that could be heard across the valley, the slashing sticks struck the bronze of Alexandros' shield.

Polynikes swung again, at the next boy and next. All shields were in place. The line protected.

He did it again from the right and from the left. Now all shields leapt into the boys' grips, all swiftly into place before them.

There.

With a nod to the platoon's
eirene,
Polynikes stepped back. The boys held fast at attention, shields at high port, with the blood beginning to cake dry on their empurpled cheekbones and shattered noses.

Polynikes repeated his order to the drill instructor, that these sheep-stroking sons of whores would do tree-fucking till the end of the second watch, then shield drill till dawn.

He walked once down the line, meeting each boy's eye. Before Alexandros, he halted.

“Your nose was too pretty, son of Olympieus. It was a girl's nose.” He tossed the boy's tripod into the dirt at his feet. “I like it better now.”

NINE

O
ne of the boys died that night. His name was Hermion; they called him “Mountain.” At fourteen he was as strong as any in his age-class or the class above, but dehydration in combination with exhaustion overcame him. He collapsed near the end of the second watch and fell into that state of convulsive torpor the Spartans call
nekrophaneia,
the Little Death, from which a man may recover if left alone but will die if he tries to rise or exert himself. Mountain understood his extremity but refused to stay down while his mates kept their feet and continued their drill.

I tried to make the platoon take water, I and my helot mate Dekton, whom they later called “Rooster.” We snuck a skin to them around the middle of the first watch, but the boys refused to accept it. At dawn they carried Mountain in on their shoulders, the way the fallen in battle are borne.

Alexandros' nose never did heal properly. His father had it broken again, twice, and reset by the finest battle surgeons, but the seam where the cartilage meets the bone never mended quite right. The airway would constrict involuntarily, triggering those spasms of the lungs called by the Greeks
asthma,
which were excruciating simply to watch and must have been unbearable to endure. Alexandros blamed himself for the death of the boy called Mountain. These fits, he was certain, were the retribution of heaven for his lapse of concentration and unwarrior-like conduct.

The spasms enfeebled Alexandros' endurance and made him less and less a match for his age-mates within the
agoge.
Worse still was the unpredictability of the attacks. When they hit, he was good for nothing for minutes at a stretch. If he could not find a way to reverse this condition, he could not when he reached manhood be made a warrior; he would lose his citizenship and be left to choose between living on in some lesser state of disgrace or embracing honor and taking his own life.

His father, gravely concerned, offered sacrifice again and again and even sent to Delphi for counsel from the Pythia. Nothing helped.

Aggravating the situation further was the fact that, despite what Polynikes had said about the boy's broken nose, Alexandros remained “pretty.” Nor did his breathing difficulties, for some reason, affect his singing. It seemed somehow that fear, rather than physical incapacity, was the trigger for these attacks.

The Spartans have a discipline they call
phobologia,
the science of fear. As his mentor, Dienekes worked with Alexandros privately on this, after evening mess and before dawn, while the units were forming up for sacrifice.

Phobologic
discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck.

A secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercises, is the face, specifically the muscles of the jaw, the neck and the four ocular constrictors around the eye sockets. These nexuses are termed by the Spartans
phobosynakteres,
fear accumulators.

Fear spawns in the body,
phobologic
science teaches, and must be combated there. For once the flesh is seized, a
phobokyklos,
or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itself, mounting into a “runaway” of terror. Put the body into a state of
aphobia,
fearlessness, the Spartans believe, and the mind will follow.

Under the oaks, in the still half-light before dawn, Dienekes practiced alone with Alexandros. He would tap the boy with an olive bough, very lightly, on the side of the face. Involuntarily the muscles of the trapezius would contract. “Feel the fear? There. Feel it?” The older man's voice crooned soothingly, like a trainer gentling a colt. “Now. Drop your shoulder.” He popped the boy's cheek again. “Let the fear bleed out. Feel it?”

Man and boy worked for hours on the “owl muscles,” the
ophthalmomyes
surrounding the eyes. These, Dienekes instructed Alexandros, were in many ways the most powerful of all, for God in His wisdom made mortals' keenest defensive reflex that which protects the vision. “Watch my face when the muscles constrict,” Dienekes demonstrated. “What expression is this?”

“Phobos.
Fear.”

Dienekes, schooled in the discipline, commanded his facial muscles to relent.

“Now. What does this expression indicate?”

“Aphobia.
Fearlessness.”

It seemed effortless when Dienekes did it, and the other boys in their training were practicing and mastering this too. But for Alexandros, nothing of the discipline came easy. The only time his heart beat truly without fear was when he mounted the choral stand and stood, solitary, to sing at the
Gymnopaedia
and the other boy's festivals.

Perhaps his true guardians were the Muses. Dienekes had Alexandros sacrifice to them and to Zeus and Mnemosyne. Agathe, one of the “two-looker” sisters of Ariston, made a charm of amber to Polyhymnia, and Alexandros carried it with him, pended from the crosshatch within his shield.

Dienekes encouraged Alexandros in his singing. The gods endow each man with a gift by which he may conquer fear; Alexandros', Dienekes felt certain, was his voice. Skill in singing in Sparta is counted second only to martial valor and in fact is closely related, through the heart and lungs, within the discipline of the
phobologia.
This is why the Lakedaemonians sing as they advance into battle. They are schooled to open the throat and gulp the air, work the lungs till the accumulators relent and break the constriction of fear.

There are two running courses within the city: the Little Ring, which begins at the
Gymnasion
and follows the Konooura road beneath Athena of the Brazen House, and the Big Ring, which laps all five villages, past Amyklai, along the Hyakinthian Way and across the slopes of Taygetos. Alexandros ran the big one, six miles barefoot, before sacrifice and after dinner mess. Extra rations were slipped him by the helot cooks. By unspoken compact the boys of his
boua
protected him in training. They covered for him when his lungs betrayed him, when it seemed he might be singled out for punishment. Alexandros responded with a secret shame which propelled him to even greater exertions.

He began to train in the “all-in,” that type of no-holds-barred boys' brawling unique to Lakedaemon, in which the competitor may kick, bite, gouge the eyes, do anything but raise the hand for quarter. Alexandros hurled himself barefoot up the Therai watercourse and bare-handed against the
pankratist
's bag; he ran weighted sprints, he pounded his fists into the trainer's boxes of sand. His slender hands became scarred and knuckle-busted. His nose broke again and again. He fought boys from his own platoon and others, and he fought me.

I was growing fast. My hands were getting stronger. Every athletic action Alexandros performed, I could do better. In the fighting square it was all I could do not to break up his face even more. He should have hated me, but it was not in him. He shared his surplus rations and worried that I would be whipped for going easy on him.

We talked for hours in secret on the pursuit of
esoterike harmonia,
that state of self-composure which the exercises of the
phobologia
are designed to produce. As a string of the
kithera
vibrates purely, emitting only that note of the musical scale which is its alone, so must the individual warrior shed all which is superfluous in his spirit, until he himself vibrates at that sole pitch which his individual
daimon
dictates. The achievement of this ideal, in Lakedaemon, carries beyond courage on the battlefield; it is considered the supreme embodiment of virtue,
andreia,
of a citizen and a man.

Beyond
esoterike harmonia
lies
exoterike harmonia,
that state of union with one's fellows which parallels the musical harmony of the multistringed instrument or of the chorus of voices itself. In battle
exoterike harmonia
guides the phalanx to move and strike as one man, of a single mind and will. In passion it unites husband to wife, lover to lover, in wordless perfect union. In politics
exoterike harmonia
produces a city of concord and unity, in which each individual, securing his own noblest expression of character, donates this to each other, as obedient to the laws of the commonwealth as the strings of the
kithera
to the immutable mathematics of music. In piety
exoterike
harmonia
produces that silent symphony which most delights the ears of the gods.

At the height of that summer there was a war with the Antirhionians. Four of the army's twelve
lochoi
were mobilized (reinforced by elements of the Skiritai, the mountain rangers who comprised their own main-force regiment) to a call-up of the first ten age-classes, twenty-eight hundred in all. This was no force to be taken lightly, all-Lakedaemonian, commanded by the king himself; the battle train alone would be half a mile long. It would be the first full-scale campaign since the death of Kleomenes and the third in which Leonidas would assume command as king.

Polynikes would go as a Knight of the king's bodyguard, Olympieus with the Huntress battalion in the Wild Olive
lochos
and Dienekes as a platoon commander, an
enomotarch,
in the Herakles. Even Dekton, my half-breed friend, would be mobilized as herd boy for the sacrificial beasts.

The entire Deukalion mess in which Alexandros “stood-to,” meaning acted as occasional cupbearer and server so he could observe his elders and learn, was called up except the five eldest men, between forty and sixty. For Alexandros, though he was six years too young to go, the mobilization seemed to plunge him even more deeply under his cloud. The uncalled-up Peers twitched about with their own brand of frustration. The air was touchy and ripe for explosiveness.

Somehow an all-in match got started one evening between Alexandros and me, outdoors behind the mess. The Peers gathered eagerly; the action was just what they needed. I could hear Dienekes' voice, cheering the brawl on. Alexandros seemed full of fire; we were bare-handed and his smallish fists flew fast as darts. He kicked me hard, to the temple, and followed with a solid elbow to the gut; I dropped. It was a true fall, I was really hurt, but the Peers had seen Alexandros' friends cover for him so frequently that they now thought I was tanking it. Alexandros did too.

“Get up, you outlander piece of shit!” He straddled me in the dirt and hit me again when I rose. For the first time I heard real killer instinct in his voice. The Peers heard it too and raised a shout of delight. Meanwhile the hounds, of whom there were never fewer than twenty after chow time, howled and bounded from every quarter in the turf-skimming fever that their masters' excited voices now drove them to.

I got up and hit Alexandros. I knew I could beat him easily, despite his crowd-impelled fury; I tried to pull my punch, just slightly so that no one would notice. They did. A howl of outrage rose from the Peers of the mess and others from adjacent
syssitia,
who had now clustered, forming a ring from which neither Alexandros nor I could escape.

Men's fists cuffed me hard about the ears. “Fight him, you little fucker!” The pack instinct had seized the hounds; they were at the verge of losing themselves to their animal nature. Suddenly two burst into the ring. One got in a nip at Alexandros before the men's sticks sent him scampering. That was it.

A spasm of the lungs seized Alexandros; his throat constricted, he began to choke. My punch hesitated. A three-foot switch burned my back. “Hit him!” I obeyed; Alexandros dropped to one knee. His lungs had frozen, he was helpless. “Pound him, you whore's son!” a voice shouted from behind me. “Finish him!”

It was Dienekes.

His switch lashed me so hard it drove me to my knees. The delirium of voices overwhelmed the senses, all calling for me to polish Alexandros off. It was not anger at him. Nor were they rooting for me. The Peers could not have cared less about me. It was for him, to teach him, to make him eat the thousandth bitter lesson of the ten thousand more he would endure before they hardened him into the rock the city demanded and allowed him to take his place as an Equal and a warrior. Alexandros knew it and rose with the fury of desperation, choking for breath; he charged like a boar. I felt the lash. I swung with everything I had. Alexandros spun and dropped, face-first into the dirt, blood and spittle slinging from the side of his mouth.

He lay there, motionless as a dead man.

The Peers' shouting ceased instantly. Only the ungodly racket of the hounds continued at its maddening shrill pitch. Dienekes stepped across to the fallen form of his protege and knelt to feel his heart. In unconsciousness Alexandros' breath returned. Dienekes' hand scraped the sputum from the boy's lips.

“What are you gaping at!” he barked at the circling Peers. “It's over! Let him be!”

The army marched out next morning for Antirhion. Leonidas strode at the fore, in full
panoplia
including slung shield, with his brow wreathed and his plumeless, unadorned helmet riding the rolled battle pack atop his scarlet cloak, his long steel-colored hair immaculately dressed and falling to his shoulders. About him marched the companion guard of the Knights, a half call-up, a hundred and fifty, with Polynikes in the forerank of honor beside six other Olympic victors. They marched not rigidly nor in grim silent lockstep, but at ease, talking and joking with one another and their families and friends along the roadside. Leonidas himself, were it not for his years and station of honor, could easily have been mistaken for a common infantryman, so unprepossessing was his armament, so nonchalant his demeanor. Yet all the city knew that this march-out, as the two previous beneath his command, was driven by his will and his will alone. It was aimed at the Persian invasion the king knew would come, perhaps not this year, perhaps not five years from now, but surely and inevitably.