Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

by Steven Pressfield

  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 now 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 thes
e 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 speedsters, 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.

  When they parted, the Spartans presented the marines with two skins of Phalerian wine, the finest they had, a gift intended for the Rhodian consulate. The marines gave each Spartan a gold daric (a month's pay for a Greek oarsman) and a sack apiece of fresh Nile pomegranates.

  The mission returned to Sparta unsuccessful. The Rhodi-ans, as His Majesty knows, are Dorian Hellenes; they speak a dialect similar to the Lakedaemonians and call their gods by the same Doric -derived names. But their island had been since before the first Persian War a protectorate of the Empire. What option other than submission did the Rhodians possess, their nation lying as it does within the very shadow of the masts of the imperial fleet? The Spartan embassy had sought, against all expectation, to detach through ancient bonds of kinship some portion of the Rhodian navy from service to His Majesty. It found no takers. Nor had there been, our embassy learned upon its return to the mainland, from simultaneous missions dispatched to Crete, Cos, Chios, Lesbos, Samos, Naxos, Imbros, Samo-thrace, Thasos, Skyros, Mykonos, Faros, Tenos and Lemnos. Even Delos, birthplace of Apollo himself, had offered tokens of submission to the Persian.

  Phobos.

  This terror could be inhaled in the air of Andros, where we touched upon the voyage home. One felt it like a sweat on the skin at Keos and Hermione, where no harbor inn or beaching ground lacked for ship's masters and oarsmen with terror- inspiring tales of the scale of mobilization in the East and eyewitness reports of the uncountable myriads of the enemy.

  Phobos.

  This stranger accompanied the embassy as it landed at Thyrea and began the dusty, two-day hump across Parnon to Lakedaemon. Trekking up the eastern massif, the envoys could see landsmen and city folk evacuating their possessions to the mountains. Boys drove asses laden with sacks of corn and barley, protected by the men of the family under arms. Soon the old ones and the children would follow. In the high country, clan groups were burying jars of wine and oil, building sheepfolds and carving crude shelters out of the cliffsides.

  Phobos.

  At the frontier fort of Karyai, our party fell in with an embassy from the Greek city of Plataea, a dozen men including a mounted escort, headed for Sparta. Their ambassador was the hero Arimnestos of Marathon. It was said that this gentleman, though well past fifty, had in that famous victory ten years past waded in full armor into the surf, slashing with his sword at the oars of the Persian triremes as they backed water, fleeing for their lives. The Spartans loved this sort of thing. They insisted on Arimnestos' party joining ours for supper and accompanying us on the remaining march to the city itself.

  The Plataean shared his intelligence of the enemy. The Persian army, he reported, comprised of two million men drawn from every nation of the Empire, had assembled at the Great King's capital, Susa, in the previous summer. The force had advanced to Sardis and wintered there.

  From this site, as the greenest lieutenant could not fail to project, the myriads would proceed north along the coast highways of Asia Minor, through Aeolis and the Troad, crossing the Hellespont by either bridge of boats or massive ferrying operation, then proceed west, traversing Thrace and the Chersonese, southwest across Macedonia and
then south into Thessaly.

  Greece proper.

  The Spartans recounted what they had learned at Rhodes; that the Persian army was already on the march from Sardis; the main body stood even now at Abydos, readying to cross the Hellespont.

  They would be in Europe within a month.

  At Selassia a messenger from the ephors in Sparta awaited my master with an ambassadorial pouch. Dienekes was to detach himself from the party and proceed at once to Olympia. He took his leave at the Pellana road and, accompanied by myself alone, set out at a fast march, intending to cover the fifty miles in two days.

  It is not uncommon upon these treks to have fall in with one as he tramps various high-spirited hounds and even half-wild urchins of the vicinity. Sometimes these carefree comrades remain on the troop all day, trotting in merry converse at the trekker's heels. Dienekes loved these ranging strays and never failed to welcome them and take cheer in their serendipitous companionship.

  This day, however, he sternly dismissed all we encountered, canine as well as human, striding resolutely onward, glancing neither left nor right.

  I had never seen him so troubled or so grave.

  An incident had occurred at Rhodes which I felt certain lay at the source of my master's disquiet.

  This event transpired at the harbor, immediately after the Spartans and Egyptian marines had completed their exchange of gifts and were making ready to take leave of one another. There arose then that interval when strangers often discard that formality of intercourse with which they have heretofore conversed and speak instead man-to-man, from the heart. The captain Ptammitechus had clearly taken to my master and the poiemarch Olympieus, Alexandras' father.