Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

  Chapter Six

  The winter, Bruxieus said, was the coldest he could re-I member. 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 poll's. 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 BruxieusI 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 lean-ing 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 hopbn 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 no
w 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.

  Chapter Seven

  I beg His Majesty's patience with this recounting of the events following the sack of a city of which he has never heard, an obscure polis without fame, spawner of no hero of legend, without link to the greater events of the present war and of the battle which His Majesty's forces fought with the Spartans and their allies at the pass of Thermopylae.

  My intent is simply to convey, through the experiences of two children and a slave, some poor measure of the soul terror and devastation which a vanquished population, any population, is forced to endure in the hour of its nation's extinction. For though His Majesty has commanded the sack of empires, yet, if one may speak plainly, he has witnessed the sufferings of their peoples only at a remove, from atop a purple throne or mounted on a caparisoned stallion, protected by the gold-pommeled spears of his royal guard.

  Over the following decade more than six score battles, campaigns and wars were fought between and among the cities of Greece. At least forty poleis, including such in-pregnably founded citadels as Knidos, Arethusa, Kolonaia, Amphissa and Metropolis, were sacked in whole or in part. Numberless farms were torched, temples burned, warships sunk, men-at-arms slaughtered, wives and daughters carried off into slavery. No Hellene, however mighty his city, could state with certainty that even one season hence he would still find himself above the earth, with his head still upon his shoulders and his wife and children slumbering in safety by his side. This state of affairs was unexceptional, neither better nor worse than any era in a thousand years, back to Achilles and Hektor, Theseus and Herakles, to the birth of the gods themselves. Business as usual, as the emporoi, the merchants, say.

  Each man of Greece knew what defeat in war meant and knew that sooner or later that bitter broth would complete its circuit of the table and settle at last before his own place.

  Suddenly, with the rise of His Majesty in Asia, it seemed that hour would be sooner.

  Terror of the sack spread throughout all Greece as word began coming, from the lips of too many to be disbelieved, of the scale of His Majesty's mobilization in the East and his intent to put all Hellas to the torch.

  So all-pervasive was this dread that it had even been given a name.

  Phobos.

  The Fear.

  Fear of you, Your Majesty. Terror of the wrath of Xerxes son of Darius, Great King of the Eastern Empire, Lord of all men from the rising to the setting sun, and the myriads all Greece knew were on the march beneath his banner to enslave us. Ten years had passed since the sack of my own city, yet the terror of that season lived on, indelible, within me. I was nineteen now.

  Events which will in their course be related had parted me from my cousin and from Bruxieus and carried me, as was my wish, to Lakedaemon and there, after a time, into the service of my master, Dienekes of Sparta. In this capacity I was dispatched (myself and a trio of other squires) in attendance upon him and three other Spartiate envoys- Olympieus, Polynikes and Aristodemos-to the island of Rhodes, a possession of His Majesty's empire. It was there that these warriors, and I myself, glimpsed for the first time a fraction of the armored might of Persia.

  The ships came first. I had been given the afternoon free and, making use of the time to learn what I could of the island, had attached myself to a company of Rhodian slingers in their practice. I watched as these ebullient fellows hurled with astonishing velocity their lead sling bullets thrice the size of a man's thumb. They could drill these murderous projectiles through half-inch pine planks at a hundred paces and strike a target the size of a man's chest three times out of four. One among them, a youth my own age, was showing me how the slingers carved with their dagger points into the soft lead of their bullets whimsical greetings-Eat this or Love and kisses-when another of the platoon looked up and pointed out to the horizon, toward Egypt.

  We saw sails, perhaps a squadron, at least an hour out. The slingers forgot them and continued their drill. What seemed like moments later, the same fellow sang out again, this time with startlement and awe. All drew up and stared. Here came the squadron, triple-bankers with their sails brailed up for speed, already turning the cape and bearing fast upon the breakwater. None had ever seen vessels of such size moving so fast. They must be skimmers, someone said. Racing shells. No full-size ship, and certainly no man-of-war, could slice the water at speeds like that.

  But they were warships. Tyrian triremes so tight to the surface that the swells seemed to crest no more than a hand-breadth beneath their thalamites' benches. They were racing each other for sport beneath His Majesty's banner. Training for Greece. For war. For the day their bronzesheathed rams would send the navies of Hellas to the bottom.

  That evening Dienekes and the other envoys made their way on foot to the harbor at Lindos. The warships were drawn up upon the strand, within a perimeter manned by Egyptian marines. These recognized the Spartans by their scarlet cloaks and long hair. A wry scene ensued. The captain of the marines motioned the Spartiates forward, calling them forth with a smile from the throng who had assembled to gawk at the vessels and taking them through a full inspecting admiral's tour.

  The men speculated, through an interpreter, about how soon they would be at war with each other, and whether fate would bring them again face-to-face across the line of slaughter.

  The Egyptian marines were the tallest men I had ever seen and burned nearly black by the sun of their desert land. They were under arms, in doeskin boots, with bronze fish-scale cuirasses and ostrich-plume helmets detailed with gold. Their weapons were the pike and scimitar. They were in high spirits, these marines, comparing the muscles of their buttocks and thighs with those of the Spartans, while each laughed in his tongue unintelligible to the other.

  Pleased to meet you, you hyena-jawed bastards. Dienekes grinned at the captain, speaking in Doric and clapping the fellow warmly upon the shoulder. I'm looking forward to carving your balls and sending them home in a basket. The Egyptian laughed uncomprehending and replied, beaming, with some foreign-tongued insult no doubt equally menacing and obscene. Dienekes asked the captain's name, which the man replied was Ptammitechus. The Spartan tongue was defeated by this and settled upon 'Tommie, which seemed to please the officer just as well. He was asked how many more warships like these the Great King numbered in his navy. Sixty came the translated response.

  Sixty ships? asked Aristodemos.

  The Egyptian loosed a brilliant smile. Sixty squadrons.

  The marines conducted the Spartans upon a more detailed examination of the warships, which, hauled up on the sand, had been canted onto careening beams, exposing the undersides of their hulls for cleaning and sealing, which chores the Tyrian seamen were now enthusiastically performing. I smelled wax. The sailors were greasing the boats' bellies for speed. The vessels' planks were butted end-to-end with mortise-and-tenon joinery of such precision that it seemed the work not of shipwrights, but of master cabinetmakers. The conjoining plates between the ram and the hull were glazed with speed-enhancing ceramic and waxed with some kind of naphthabased oil which the mariners applied molten, with paddles. Alongside these sp
eedsters, the Spartan state galley Orthia looked like a garbage scow. But the items which commanded the most animated attention bore no bearing to concerns of the sea.

  These were the mail loincloths worn by the marines to protect their private parts.

  What are these, diapers? Dienekes inquired, laughing and tugging at the hem of the captain's corselet.

  Be careful, my friend, the marine responded with a mock-theatric gesture, I have heard about you Greeks!

  The Egyptian inquired of the Spartans why they wore their hair so long. Olympieus replied, quoting the lawmaker Lykurgus, Because no other adornment makes a handsome man more comely or an ugly one more terrifying. And it's free.

  The marine next began teasing the Spartans about their notoriously short xiphos swords. He refused to believe that these were the actual weapons the Lakedaemonians carried into battle.

  They must be toys. How could such diminutive apple-corers possibly work harm to an enemy?

  The trick is-Dienekes demonstrated, pressing himself chest-to-chest to the Egyptian Tommie -to get nice and cozy.