A Peerless Peer

by Helena P. Schrader

  Dogs started yelping as they approached, and Leonidas frowned and announced in annoyance, “That’s the pair of puppies Alkander and Hilaira insisted on giving me to replace poor Beggar.”

  “I can bring Jason here, can’t I?”

  “Of course. What did you do with him tonight?”

  “He sleeps in the kitchens. He won’t notice I’m gone until I don’t come for him in the morning.”

  Leonidas told Gorgo to go ahead into the house and that he would see to the horses, but she shook her head and came with him. They put the horses in the boxes, in which hay and water waited for them. Leonidas looked in at the kennels and tried to quiet the puppies, and then they skirted around the helot quarters and crossed the back terrace, bathed in moonlight.

  “I know you won’t believe me, Leo, but this really does feel like home,” Gorgo whispered, a little overwhelmed by how true this was.

  Leonidas was pleased, but he was also getting cold without his himation. “I hope it will feel as much like home inside,” he told her, indicating the outdoor steps that led directly to his bedroom.

  Inside, as expected, Laodice had put fresh-pressed linens on the bed and hung lavender from the ceiling. Pitchers and kothons waited on a chest beside the bed, along with a bowl of nuts and raisins. A brazier, glowing on the far side of the bed, had taken the chill off the air.

  Leonidas closed the door behind them and considered his niece. She was clutching his red himation around her shoulders, and her hacked-off hair hung raggedly around her face. But she had never looked so lovely to him. She turned to meet his gaze and her lips were moist, catching the moonlight that filtered through the slats of the shutters over the window. Her eyes glistened in the light, too. She was smiling at him, albeit a little uncertainly.

  He stepped closer and drew her into his arms, and she lifted her face to his. He kissed her on the lips for the first time in their lives, and she seemed to simply melt into him.

  Chapter 20

  Growing Threats

  Returning from summer maneuvers on the Argive border, Leonidas’ company followed the coastal road south, hoping to make the turnoff for Thyrea before dark. Leonidas was pressing the pace a bit because he was anxious to get home to Gorgo. Shortly before the turnoff, the road looped inward behind a headland that blocked their view of the Gulf and led through a dense forest. It had been a cloudy day, but abruptly the clouds sank down and opened their bellies to dump rain laced with hail.

  Leonidas immediately ordered his pentekostus to seek shelter amid the trees. Within minutes, however, the wind was tearing branches down around them. Then, with a horrible screeching and wailing, some of the trees started to break and fall. No one was concerned about staying dry anymore. They were drenched to the bone. The issue was staying alive.

  Leonidas sent all three runners and Meander out to find a suitable place to shelter 250 men, one hundred Spartiate troops, their attendants, and the company helots. Crius returned first with the news that a gorge up ahead would offer some protection; so Leonidas ordered the troops forward, followed by the helots with the draft and pack animals, but abandoning the wagons.

  By the time they reached it, the gorge was running fast with the sudden torrent of water rushing off the mountains. Still, the rocky sides offered some protection from the falling trees and branches. The hoplites found places to sit or at least lean against the sides of the gorge, and used their hoplons to protect themselves and their attendants from rain and flying objects. The bulk of the company helots got themselves up onto a deep ledge with sufficient overhang to protect them. This was too high up the wall, however, for the horses and mules. While the mules turned their haunches into the wind and dropped their heads, some of the horses were too high-strung and tried to bolt. One of the grooms broke an ankle when a fleeing horse dragged him several yards over rough terrain before he obeyed the order to let it go. Another helot broke his arm falling on the slippery rocks while trying to steady another horse.

  Leonidas stayed with the helots attending the horses at the foot of the gorge, holding his own nervous stallion and one of the mules. As he watched the great dark clouds rolling and churning overhead, he shuddered inwardly. Although he was not naturally superstitious, this storm seemed especially ominous. It appeared to portend something particularly evil.

  By dusk, however, the worst of the storm had passed; and since everyone was too bedraggled and tired to continue the march, Leonidas decided to camp where they were. He went back with the helots to collect the wagons, but since it was still raining there was no point in unloading supplies.

  The men huddled in the gorge through the night, getting little sleep, as the wind still howled down the gorge and made the surrounding forest roar. They couldn’t even warm themselves, because there was no dry wood with which to keep fires going. Without cooked food, they fed themselves on salted meat and hard cheese. Leonidas thought longingly of Laodice’s cooking and Gorgo’s bed, and told himself he would be there the day after tomorrow.

  Sometime during the night the wind eased up, and dawn broke behind a bank of clouds that ended overhead. Within another hour or two they would have the sun again. Men unbent themselves and staggered up on cramped muscles, cursing and groaning as circulation returned to limbs that had gone to sleep in awkward poses. Leonidas and his enomotarchs started reorganizing and checking for serious injuries. They had lost three horses and one mule. Two helots had broken bones and one hoplite had sprained an ankle, but that was it. Nothing more serious than a cold, sleepless night, really—and it was over.

  Knocking water from the crests of their helmets and wringing out their himations before reattaching them at the shoulders, they formed up. At first mud clung to their legs, chitons, and arms, but as they marched the sun broke clear of the retreating sheet of cloud; soon it had dried the mud, which then flaked off. The road turned back toward the coast and started descending. They were now no more than an hour from the turnoff inland at Thyrea, and some of the men started singing. The songs learned long ago in the agoge made the marching easier.

  As a company commander, Leonidas no longer marched with his men. He was mounted and riding back to check on the supply wagons when the leading ranks of the column rounded the bend behind the headland. Ahead of them was a splendid view of the Gulf of Argos, glittering in the morning sun. The sight brought the front ranks to a halt so suddenly that the ranks behind collided into them. Cursing replaced singing—but only in the rear. The front rank had fallen ominously silent and seemed turned to stone.

  Leonidas heard the song cut off abruptly. He looked over his shoulder, instantly sensed something was wrong, and spun his stallion around to canter forward along the side of the road. As he came around the bend, he pulled up in horror and gaped, just as his rankers had done before him.

  Spread out before them on the curving, sandy beach of the bay were the carcasses of three ships, and between and around them lay the bodies of hundreds of dead. The bodies were being blown onshore by the wind, but then floated off by the tide. They rose and fell on the swells like flotsam. Nowhere in the floating carpet of dead was there even a faint flicker of life.

  When they reached the beach, they learned why. The corpses were tied together by ropes around their necks, while their wrists and ankles were also bound. They had never had a chance.

  “Slave transport?” Oliantus asked, staring at the carpet of corpses undulating on the swells.

  “But where are the crews? Why didn’t they set them free?” one of the section leaders asked.

  The enomotarch who had gone farther up the beach to inspect the wrecks returned. “They weren’t ships, but barges,” he informed the others. “No form of propulsion. They were evidently being towed, and when the bad weather set in they were just cut loose.”

  “But there must be nearly three hundred slaves here! That’s a huge investment. What merchant would risk losing so much cargo at once?” Oliantus had been tasked with organization too long not to think in practi
cal terms.

  “If it’s their lives or yours …”

  Leonidas had stopped listening. He had seen something that he did not want to believe; and so he waded into the water, kicking the corpses nearest the shore out of his way. His approach sent the seagulls soaring and protesting. He was swallowing back bile, but he had to be sure he was not imagining things. Then he stood directly over them—a chain of boys not more than ten, their faces still unfinished and smooth, their fine hair swirling around them in the eddies of the tide. All the little boys had been recently and brutally castrated. The salt water had washed away the blood and bandages, exposing the gaping wounds all the more clearly.

  “Not slaves, captives. Persian captives,” Leonidas summarized to the men he heard wading in after him.

  Just before they had set out on these maneuvers, word had reached Sparta that the Ionian rebels had suffered a devastating naval defeat. The reports from Corinth claimed that after six years of tweaking the tail of the Persian Empire with their insubordination and audacity, the rebels had risked an open confrontation. If the accounts were credited, the rebels had mustered more than 350 triremes to face a Phoenician fleet of about 500 fighting ships at Lade, off Miletos. According to the Corinthians, when the fleets actually met, some of the Samian captains either lost their nerve or had taken Persian pay. In any case, before even engaging, they broke and ran. This naturally led to widespread panic among the rebel contingents. The Lesbians and many others followed the Samian lead and took flight rather than engaging. The 100 Chian ships and isolated remnants of their allies fought with determination and courage, but these forces were hopelessly outnumbered. Despite initial successes, the Chians were eventually routed. After this defeat, resistance to Persian rule collapsed across the Aegean, and Persia was seeking retribution.

  Until this moment, however, Leonidas had not truly understood what the reports of Persian “retribution” meant. Now he was staring at the evidence of what befell the population of the once rebellious and now subdued Greek cities.

  Leonidas believed the Ionian rebellion had been foolish. Sparta had refused to send aid for good reasons. As Gorgo, whose role in the decision had not been insignificant, pointed out, the rebellion had been led by tyrants more interested in their own fortune than in the freedom of their cities. But these children, Leonidas found himself thinking, had paid the price.

  “We must bury them,” he announced, “there beneath the temple.” He pointed to the edge of the beach below a small ancient temple to Poseidon, then turned to splash his way back to the beach.

  Oliantus nodded and started giving orders. No one seemed to mind that Leonidas did not stop to help as he usually did, but continued instead to the temple and sank down on one knee before the altar. He knelt for a long time, his head bent, lost in his own emotions. He could not forget that just over two decades ago and not far from here, he had briefly fallen into Persian hands. He might have ended like these boys. It shook him to his bone marrow. He had been saved by Prokles’ grandfather, who had talked the perioikoi commander of the Eastern Squadron into launching no less than two triremes to rescue two foolish schoolboys. But Sparta had not been prepared to send a single ship or a company of infantry to save the island cities of Ionia …

  Leonidas returned to the beach. The helots were hauling the strings of corpses onshore the same way fishermen haul nets, working in teams. As each corpse came within reach, one helot cut the neck rope binding the corpses to each other and the others lifted the body onto the back of a waiting colleague. This man carried it toward the long pit that had been dug by the hoplites in the soft soil under the bank.

  Leonidas came up behind the men lowering the first of the corpses into the common grave. “Cut their hands and feet free. They may have died as slaves, but they are being buried as free men.”

  The enomotarch addressed looked over his shoulder, surprised to have Leonidas suddenly behind him; but he nodded, and without further instruction one of his men took a knife and did as Leonidas ordered.

  Leonidas continued down the length of the grave, repeating the order to each commander.

  Toward the end of the line he came upon Temenos. Temenos had graduated from the agoge and was now a citizen and soldier. He was helping cut the bonds of the corpses and looked as ill as Leonidas felt. Leonidas put a hand on Temenos’ shoulder, and the young man looked over sharply.

  “Greeks are capable of equal cruelty.” Leonidas was thinking of the “Farm of Horrors” on Kythera. But he continued, “It is the scale of the Persian atrocities that is so terrifying—their ability to inflict so much suffering at once.”

  “But it is terrifying, sir.” Although it was Temenos who spoke, all the men had stopped to listen to the exchange between the young man and their commander. Whether older men on the brink of full citizenship or young men like Temenos, barely out of the agoge, they nodded in agreement. Leonidas saw his own horror and fear reflected in their eyes.

  “We have never faced an enemy like this before,” Leonidas conceded.

  “Are they our enemy, sir?”

  Leonidas took a deep breath; he looked from the corpses back to the wrecks on the beach and then squinted as he looked farther east, beyond the horizon, where the Persian Empire stretched. It was an empire so vast that it would take six months of marching to cross from one side to the other. It was unimaginable. Perhaps more importantly, it was filled with peoples all prepared to obey the orders of a single man, their Great King—not a collection of squabbling city-states each jealous of its own territory, customs, and privileges. The Ionian revolt had not been subdued by Persia’s famous cavalry, but by the ships and crews of Phoenicia in obedience to Persian orders.

  Leonidas turned back to his troops. No one was working anymore; they were all waiting to see what he would say. “They are not our enemy today. But if they seek to cross the Aegean and establish themselves anywhere on the Hellenic peninsula, then they will become our enemy. Sparta cannot afford to tolerate a power such as Persia near at hand.”

  “Not even north of the Isthmus?”

  “Not even there.”

  He nodded for them to get back to work, and returned to the temple of Poseidon to make a sacrifice and pray that the sea would stay between Persia and Greece.

  Two days later, they were home. The gentle but solid Parnon range lay between them and the Aegean with its harvest of savagery. It was easy to pretend that Sparta was safe behind her mountain barriers, safe from retribution because she had not taken sides in the conflict between Persia and her subject Greeks, and safe because she had the finest army in the world …

  Leonidas wanted to believe that. He marched his pentekostus into the city in full panoply, with shields and helmets gleaming. They were received by the casual cheers of boys and youths and idle citizens. At the barracks, the wagons and pack animals were turned over to the army helots, and the men and their attendants were dismissed. After maneuvers, units always had a fortnight leave. Leonidas rode straight for his kleros, Meander beside him.

  It was sometimes hard to believe he had been married to Gorgo only two years. From the day she set foot on his kleros, Gorgo had belonged completely. Leonidas would never forget returning home on the first day after their marriage. He had left before dawn to report to his commanding officer and then to inform the ephors. As Leonidas had anticipated, the ephors were delighted and quick to spread the news. By the time Cleomenes woke from his wine-heavy sleep and discovered his daughter gone, it was too late to protest. Faced with widespread positive reaction, Cleomenes had little choice but to pretend great satisfaction in public. Privately he summoned Leonidas and swore he would never forgive him—or Gorgo.

  That first day after his wedding, Leonidas had returned to his kleros exhausted and tense. When he walked through the door, however, he heard laughter coming from the kitchen. He followed the sound to find his wife sitting with Laodice, Melissa, and Chryse around the kitchen table, helping to shell nuts and apparently gossiping,
as if she had lived there all her life. At the sight of him in the doorway, her face had lit up, and it was as if a curse had been broken.

  Within weeks Leonidas could not remember what it had been like without her—except as a vague, gray dream he preferred to forget. When he compared this marriage to the last, it was like night and day. He had always been trying to please Eirana, always failing, always unsure of himself, and always disappointed. Gorgo, on the other hand, was so happy that he didn’t even have to make an effort to please her; yet his simplest gestures, things he hardly thought about, made her even more affectionate and grateful. The positive spiral seemed to have no end. Gorgo had transformed his life without even trying. He still had ambitions and plans. He still took his work with the army seriously; but he knew that at some level the only thing that mattered to him was Gorgo.

  Gorgo and their unborn child. Gorgo had brought him the news this past winter, brimming with pride and excitement. He was delighted. He wanted children, several children. He especially wanted a son he could raise as he imagined a father ought to raise his sons. And he wanted an heir, a son by Gorgo, who would checkmate any designs Brotus had on the throne. Gorgo’s son would represent direct descent from the ruling Agiad king; and Leonidas was confident the ephors, Council, and Assembly would recognize any boy he sired on Gorgo as the rightful heir to the Agiad throne, bypassing Brotus.

  But as Gorgo’s time drew near, he couldn’t forget that women died in childbirth more often than men died in battle. No matter how much he tried to suppress his fears of losing her, they were growing. Gorgo, he calculated, would be big and slow by now. Eirana had been virtually immobilized during the last month of her confinement. Of course, she had been carrying twins, but Leonidas understood that a child sapped a woman’s strength—and Gorgo was only nineteen.