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

by Steven Pressfield

  Each soldier's thoughts turned now toward his family, to those at home whom his heart loved.

  Shivering, exhausted men scribbled letters to wives and children, mothers and fathers, many of these missives little more than scratches upon cloth or leather, fragments of ceramic or wood.

  The letters were wills and testaments, final words of farewell. I saw the dispatch pouch of one runner preparing to depart; it was a jumble of paper rolls, wax tablets, potshards, even felt scraps torn from helmet undercaps. Many of the warriors simply sent amulets which their loved ones would recognize, a charm that had pended from the chassis of a shield, a good-luck coin drilled through for a neckband. Some of these bore salutations-Beloved Amaris… Delia from Thea-gones, love. Others bore no name at all. Perhaps the runners of each city knew the addressees personally and could take it upon themselves to ensure delivery. If not, the contents of the pouch would be displayed in the public square or the agora, perhaps set out before the temple of the city's Protectress. There the anxious families would congregate in hope and trepidation, awaiting their turn to pore through the precious cargo, desperate for any message, wordless or otherwise, from those whom they loved and feared to behold again only in death.

  Two messengers came in from the allied fleet, from the Athenian corvette assigned as courier between the navy below and the army up top. The allies had engaged the Persian fleet this day, inconclusively, but without buckling. Our ships must hold the straits or Xerxes could land his army in the defenders' rear and cut them off; the troops must hold the pass or the Persian could advance by land to the narrows of the Euripus and trap the fleet. So far, neither had cracked.

  Polynikes came and sat for a few minutes beside the fires around which the remains of our platoon had gathered. He had located a renowned gymnastes, an athletic trainer named Milon, whom he knew from the Games at Olympia. This fellow had wrapped Polynikes' hamstrings and given him a pharmakon to kill the pain.

  Have you had enough of glory, Kallistos? Dienekes inquired of the Knight. Polynikes answered only with a look of surpassing grim-ness. He seemed chastened, out of himself for once.

  Sit down, my master said, indicating a dry space beside him.

  Polynikes settled gratefully. Around the circle the platoon slumbered like dead men, heads pillowed upon each other and their yet-gore-encrusted shields. Directly across from Polynikes, Alexandras stared with awful blankness into the fire. His jaw had been broken; the entire right side of his face glistened purple; the bone itself was cinched shut with a leather strap.

  Let's have a look at you. Polynikes craned forward. He located among the trainer's kit a waxed wad of euphorbia and amber called a boxer's lunch, the kind pugilists employ between matches to immobilize broken bones and teeth. This Polynikes kneaded warm until it became pliable. He turned to the trainer. You better do this, Milon. Polynikes took Alexandras' right hand in his own, for the pain. Hang on. Squeeze till you break my fingers.

  The trainer spit from his own mouth into Alexandras' a purge of uncut wine to cleanse the clotted blood, then with his fingers extracted a grotesque gob of spittle, mucus and phlegm. I held Alexandras' head; the youth's fist clamped Polynikes'. Dienekes watched as the trainer inserted the sticky amber wad between Alexandras' jaws, then gently clamped the shattered bone down tight upon it. Count slowly, he instructed the patient. When you hit fifty, you won't be able to prise that jaw apart with a crowbar.

  Alexandras released the Knight's hand. Polynikes regarded him with sorrow.

  Forgive me, Alexandros.

  For what?

  For breaking your nose.

  Alexandros laughed, his broken jaw making him grimace.

  It's your best feature now.

  Alexandros winced again. I'm sorry about your father, Polynikes said. And Ariston.

  He rose to move on to the next fire, glancing once to my master, then returning his gaze to Alexandros.

  There is something I must tell you. When Leonidas selected you for the Three Hundred, I went to him in private and argued strenuously against your inclusion. I thought you would not fight.

  I know, Alexandros' voice ground through his cinched jaw.

  Polynikes studied him a long moment.

  I was wrong, he said.

  He moved on.

  Another round of orders came, assigning parties to retrieve corpses from no-man's-land. Suicide's name was among those detailed. Both his shot shoulders had seized up; Alexandros insisted on taking his place.

  By now the king will know about the deaths of my father and Ariston. He addressed Dienekes, who as his platoon commander could forbid him to participate in the retrieval detail. Leonidas will try to spare me for my family's sake; he'll send me home with some errand or dispatch. I don't wish to disrespect him by refusing.

  I had never beheld such an expression of balefulness as that which now framed itself upon my master's face. He gestured to a flat of sodden earth beside him in the firelight.

  I've been watching these little myrmidons.

  There in the dirt, a war of the ants was raging.

  Look at these champions. Dienekes indicated the massed battalions of insects grappling with impossible valor atop a pile of their own fellows' fallen forms, battling over the desiccated corpse of a beetle.

  This one here, this would be Achilles. And there. That must be Hektor. Our bravery is nothing alongside these heroes'. See? They even drag their comrades' bodies from the field, as we do.

  His voice was dense with disgust and stinking with irony. Do you think the gods look down on us as we do upon these insects? Do the immortals mourn our deaths as keenly as we feel the loss of these?

  Get some sleep, Dienekes, Alexandros said gently.

  Yes, that's what I need. My beauty rest.

  He lifted his remaining eye toward Alexandros. Out beyond the redoubts of the Wall, the second watch of sentries was receiving their orders, preparatory to relieving the first. Your father was my mentor, Alexandros. I bore the chalice the night you were born. I remember Olympieus presenting your infant form to the elders, for the 'ten, ten and one' test, to see if you were deemed healthy enough to be allowed to live. The magistrate bathed you in wine and you came up squawling, with your infant's voice strong and your little fists clenched and waving. 'Hand the boy to Dienekes,' your fa-ther instructed Paraleia. 'My son will be your protege,' Olympieus told me. 'You will teach him, as I have taught you.'

  Dienekes' right hand plunged the blade of his xiphos into the dirt, annihilating the Iliad of the ants. Now sleep, all of you! he barked to the men yet surviving of his platoon and, himself rising, despite all protests that he, too, embrace the boon of slumber, strode off alone toward Leonidas' command post, where the king and the other commanders yet stood to their posts, awake and planning the morrow's action.

  I saw Dienekes' hip give way beneath him as he moved; not the bad leg, but the sound. He was concealing from his men's sight yet another wound-from the cast of his gait, deep and crippling.

  I rose at once and hastened to his aid.

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  That spring called the Skyllian, sacred to Demeter and Persephone, welled from the base of the wall of Kal-lidromos just to the rear of Leonidas' command post. Upon its stone-founded approach my master drew up, and I hurrying in his wake overhauled him. No curses or commands to withdraw rebuffed me. I draped his arm about my neck and took his weight upon my shoulder. I'll get water, I said.

  An agitated knot of warriors had clustered about the spring; Megistias the seer was there.

  Something was amiss. I pressed closer. This spring, renowned for its alternating flows of cold and hot, had gushed since the allies' arrival with naught but sweet cold water, a boon from the goddesses to the warriors' thirst. Now suddenly the fount had gone hot and stinking. A steaming sulphurous brew spewed forth from the underworld like a river of hell. The men trembled before this prodigy. Prayers to Demeter and the Kore were being sung. I begged a half-helmetful of water from the
Knight Doreion's skin and returned to my master, steeling myself to mention nothing.

  The spring's gone sulphurous, hasn't it?

  It presages the enemy's death, sir, not ours.

  You're as full of shit as the priests.

  I could see he was all right now.

  The allies need your cousin upon this site, he observed, settling in pain upon the earth, to intercede with the goddess on their behalf.

  He meant Diomache.

  Here, he said. Sit beside me.

  This was the first time I had heard my master refer aloud to Diomache, or even acknowledge his awareness of her existence. Though I had never, in our years, presumed to burden him with details of my own history prior to entering his service, I knew he knew it all, through Alexandros and the lady Arete.

  This is a goddess I have always felt pity for-Persephone, my master declared. Six months of the year she rules as Hades' bride, mistress of the underworld. Yet hers is a reign bereft of joy.

  She sits her throne as a prisoner, carried off for her beauty by the lord of hell, who releases his queen under Zeus' compulsion for half the year only, when she comes back to us, bringing spring and the rebirth of the land. Have you looked closely at statues of her, Xeo? She appears grave, even in the midst of the harvest's joy. Does she, like us, recall the terms of her sentence-to retire again untimely beneath the earth? This is the sorrow of Persephone. Alone among the immortals the Kore is bound by necessity to shuttle from death to life and back again, intimate of both faces of the coin. No wonder this fount whose twin sources are heaven and hell is sacred to her.

  I had settled now upon the ground beside my master. He regarded me gravely.

  It's too late, don't you think, he pronounced, for you and I to keep secrets from one another?

  I agreed the hour was far advanced.

  Yet you preserve one from me.

  He would have me speak of Athens, I could see, and the evening barely a month previous wherein I had at last- through his intercession-met again my cousin.

  Why didn't you run? Dienekes asked me. I wanted you to, you know.

  I tried. She wouldn't let me.

  I knew my master would not compel me to speak. He would never presume to tread where his presence sowed distress. Yet instinct told me the hour to break silence had come. At worst my report would divert his preoccupation from the day's horror and at best turn it, perhaps, to more propitious imaginings.

  Shall I tell you of that night in Athens, sir?

  Only if you wish.

  It was upon an embassy, I reminded him. He, Polynikes and Aristodemos had traveled on foot from Sparta then, without escort, accompanied only by their squires. The party had covered the distance of 140 miles in four days and remained there in the city of the Athenians for four more, at the home of the proxenos Kleinias the son of Alkibiades. The object of the legation was to finalize the eleventh-hour details of coordinating land and sea forces at Thermopylae and Artemisium: times of arrival for army and fleet, modes of dispatch between them, courier encryptions, passwords and the like. Unspoken but no less significant, Spartans and Athenians wished to look each other in the eye one last time, to make sure both forces would be there, in their places, at the appointed hour.

  On the evening of the third day, a salon was held in honor of the embassy at the home of Xanthippus, a prominent Athenian. I loved to listen at these affairs, where debate and discourse were always spirited and often brilliant. To my great disappointment, my master summoned me alone before table and informed me of an urgent errand I must run. Sorry, he said, you'll miss the party. He placed into my hands a sealed letter, with instructions to deliver it in person to a certain residence in the seaport town of Phaleron. A boy servant of the house awaited without, to serve as guide through the nighttime streets. No particulars were given beyond the addressee's name. I assumed the communication to be a naval dispatch of some urgency and so traveled armed.

  It took the time of an entire watch to traverse that labyrinth of quarters and precincts which comprises the city of the Athenians. Everywhere men-at-arms, sailors and marines were mobilizing; chandlery waggons rumbled under armed escorts, bearing the rations and supplies of the fleet. The squadrons under Themistokles were readying for embarkation to Skiathos and Artemisium. Simultaneously families by the hundreds were crating their valuables and fleeing the city. As numerous as were the warcraft moored in lines across the harbor, their ranks were eclipsed by the ragtag fleet of merchantmen, ferries, fishing smacks, pleasure boats and excursion craft evacuating the citizenry to Troezen and Salamis. Some of the families were fleeing for points as distant as Italia, As the boy and I approached Phaleron port, so many torches filled the streets that the passage was lit bright as noon.

  Lanes became crookeder as we approached the harbor. The stink of low tide choked one's nostrils; gutters ran with filth, backed up into a malodorous stew of fish guts, leek shavings and garlic. I never saw so many cats in my life. Grogshops and houses of ill fame lined streets so narrow that daylight's cleansing beams, I was certain, never penetrated to the floors of their canyons to dry the slime and muck of the night's commerce in depravity. The whores called out boldly as the boy and I passed, advertising their wares in coarse but good-humored tongue. The man to whom we were to deliver the letter was named Terrentaius. I asked the lad if he had any idea who the fellow was or what station he held. He said he had been given the house name alone and nothing more.

  At last the boy and I located it, an apartment structure of three stories called the Griddle after the slop shop and inn which occupied its street-level floor. I inquired within for the man Terrentaius.

  He was absent, the publican declared, with the fleet. I asked after the man's ship. Which vessel was he officer of? A round of hilarity greeted this query. He's a lieutenant of the ash, one of the tippling seamen declared, meaning the only thing he commanded was the oar he pulled. Further inquiries failed to elicit any additional intelligence. Then, sir, the boy guide addressed me, we are instructed to deliver the letter to his wife.

  I rejected this as nonsense.

  No, sir, replied the lad with conviction, I have it from your master himself. We are to place the letter in the hands of the man's mistress, by name Diomache.

  With but a moment's consideration I perceived in this event the hand, not to say the long arm, of the lady Arete. How had she tracked down and located, from the remove of Lakedaemon, this house and this woman? There must be a hundred Diomaches in a city the size of Athens. No doubt the lady Arete had maintained her intentions secret, anticipating that I, made aware of them in advance, would have found excuse to evade their obligation. In this, she was doubtless correct.

  In any event my cousin, it was discovered, was not present in the apartments, nor could any of the seamen inform us as to her whereabouts. My guide, a lad of resourcefulness, simply stepped into the alley and bellowed her name. In moments the grizzled heads of half a dozen backstreet dames appeared above, among the hanging laundry of the lane-facing windows. The name and site of a harbor-town temple were shouted down to us.

  She'll be there, boy. Just follow the shore.

  My guide set out again in the lead. We traversed more stinking sea-town streets, more alleys choked with traffic of the natives clearing out. The boy informed me that many of the temples in this quarter functioned less as sanctuaries of the gods and more as asylums for the cast-out and the penniless, particularly, he said, wives put by by their husbands. Meaning those deemed unfit, unwilling, or even insane. The boy pressed ahead in merry spirits. It was all a grand adventure to him.

  At last we stood before the temple. It was nothing but a common house, perhaps home in former times to a middling-prosperous trader or merchant, sited upon a surprisingly cheerful slope two streets above the water. A copse of olives sheltered a walled enclave whose inner precinct could not be glimpsed from the street. I rapped at the gate; after an interval a priestess, if such a lofty title may be applied to a gowned and maske
d housewoman of fifty years, responded. She informed us the sanctuary was that of Demeter and Covert Kore, Persephone of the Veil. None but females might enter. Behind the shroud which concealed her face, the priestess was clearly frightened, nor could one blame her, the streets running with whoremongers and cutpurses. She would not let us in. No avenue of appeal proved of avail; the woman would neither confirm my cousin's presence nor agree to convey a message within. Again my boy guide took the bull by the horns. He opened his cheesepipe and bawled Diomache's name.

  We were admitted at last to a rear courtyard, the lad and I. The house upon entry proved far more capacious, and a good deal cheerier, than it had appeared from the street. We were not permitted passage through the interior but escorted along an outer path. The dame, our chaperon, confirmed that a matron by name Diomache was indeed among those novices currently resident within the sanctuary. She was at this hour attending to duties in the kitchen; an interview, however, of a few minutes' duration might be granted, with permission from the asylum mother. My guide, the boy, was offered refreshment; the dame took him away for a feed.

  I was standing, alone in the courtyard, when my cousin entered. Her children, both girls, one perhaps five, the other a year or two older, clung fearfully to her skirts; they would not come forward when I knelt and held out my hand. Forgive them, my cousin said. They are shy of men. The dame led the girls away to the interior, leaving me at last alone with Diomache.

  How many times in imagination had I rehearsed this moment. Always in conjured scenarios, my cousin was young and beautiful; I ran to her arms and she to mine. Nothing of the sort now occurred. Diomache stepped into view in the lamplight, garbed in black, with the entire breadth of the court dividing us. The shock of her appearance unstrung me. She was unveiled and unhooded. Her hair was cropped short. Her years were no more than twenty-four yet she looked forty, and a hard-used forty at that.