Gates of Fire

by Steven Pressfield

  The Medes had cracked. The Tegeates and Opountian Lokrians surged in reinforcement through the ranks of the spent Spartans, pressing the assault upon the reeling enemy. It was the allies' turn now. Put the steel to 'em, boys! one among the Spartans cried as the wave of allied ranks advanced ten deep from the rear and both flanks and closed into a massed phalanx before the warriors of Sparta, who at last drew up, limbs quaking with fatigue, and collapsed against one another and upon the earth.

  At last I found my master. He was on one knee, shattered with exhaustion, clinging with both fists to his shivered blade-bereft spear which was driven butt-spike-first into the earth and from which he hung like a broken marionette upon a stick. The weight of his helmet bore his head groundward; he possessed strength neither to lift it nor to pull it off. Alex-andros collapsed beside him, on all fours with the crown of his helmet, crest-first, mashed with exhaustion into the dirt. His rib cage heaved like a hound's, while spittle, phlegm and blood dripped from the bronze of his cheekpieces in a frothing lather.

  Here came the Tegeates and Lokrians, surging past us.

  There they went, driving the enemy before them.

  For the first interval in what seemed an eternity, the dread of imminent extinction lifted. The Lakedaemonians dropped to the earth where they stood, on knees first, then knees and elbows, then simply sprawling, on sides and on backs, collapsing against one another, sucking breath in gasping labored need. Eyes stared vacantly, as if blind. None could summon strength to speak.

  Weapons drooped of their own weight, in fists so cramped that the will could not compel the muscles to release their frozen grasp. Shields toppled to earth, bowl-down and defamed; exhausted men collapsed into them face-first and could not find strength even to turn their faces to the side to breathe.

  A fistful of teeth spit from Alexandros' mouth. When he recovered strength sufficient to prise his helmet off, his long hair came out at the roots in wads, a tangled mass of salt sweat and matted blood. His eyes stared, blank as stones. He collapsed like a child, burying his face in my master's lap, weeping the dry tears of those whose shattered substance has no more fluid to spend.

  Suicide came up, shot through both shoulders and oblivious with elation. He stood above the collapsed ranks of men, fearless, peering out to where the allies had now closed with the last of the Medes and were hacking them to pieces with such a grisly din that it seemed the slaughter was taking place ten paces away instead of a hundred.

  I could see my master's eyes, pools of black behind the hooded eye-slits of his helmet. His hand gestured feebly to the empty spear sheath across my back. What happened to my spares? his throat croaked hoarsely.

  I gave them away.

  A moment passed while he waited for breath, To our own men, I hope.

  I helped him off with his helmet. It seemed to take minutes, so swollen with sweat and blood was his felt undercap and the tangled clotted mass of his hair. The water bearers had arrived. None among the warriors possessed the strength even to cup his hands, so the liquid was simply splashed upon rags and blouses which the men pressed to their lips and sucked. Dienekes swabbed the tangled hair off his face. His left eye was gone. Sliced through, leaving a ghoulish socket of tissue and blood. I know was all he said.

  Aristomenes and Bias and others of the platoon, Black Leon and Leon Donkeydick, now surfaced into view, gasping upon the earth, their arms and legs sliced and lacerated with innumerable slashes, glistening with mud and blood. They and other scrambled men from other scrambled units lay heaped upon one another like a frieze on a temple wall.

  I knelt now at my master's side, pressing the water rag as a compress into the hollow where his eye had been. The fabric welled with fluid like a sponge.

  Out front, where the enemy were falling back in wild disorder, the victors of the moment could see Polynikes, on his feet, alone, with his arms raised toward the fleeing foe. He wrenched his helmet from his skull, dripping blood and sweat, and flung it in triumph upon the earth.

  Not today, you sons of whores! he bellowed at the foe in flight. Not today!

  Chapter Twenty Five

  I cannot state with certainty how many times on that first day each allied contingent took its turn upon the triangle bounded by the Narrows and the mountain face, the sea cliffs and the Phokian Wall. I can declare with conviction only that my master went through four shields, two whose oak underchassis were shattered by repeated blows, one whose bronze plexus was staved in and a fourth whose gripcord and forearm sheath were ripped right out of their sockets. Replacements were not hard to find. One had only to stoop, so many were the discards littered upon the field, with their owners dead and dying beside them.

  Of the sixteen in my master's enomotia were slain on that first day Lampitos, Soobiades, Telemon, Sthlenelaides, Aris-ton and grievously wounded Nikandros, Myron, Charillon and Bias.

  Ariston fell in the fourth and final siege, that against His Majesty's Immortals. Ariston was that youth of twenty years, one of Polynikes' broken noses, whose sister Agathe had been given as a bride to Alexandras. That made them brothers-in-law.

  The retrieval party found Ariston's body around mid-night, along the mountain wall. His squire Demades' form lay sprawled atop Ariston's with his shield still in place seeking to protect his master, both of whose shins had been shattered by the blows of a sagaris battle-axe. The shaft of an enemy lance was broken off just beneath Demades' left nipple. Although Ariston had sustained more than twenty wounds upon his own body, it was a single blow to the head, apparently delivered with some kind of mace or battle sledge, which had ultimately slain him, crushing both helmet and skull directly above the eyeline.

  The tickets of the dead were customarily held and distributed by the chief battle priest, in this case Alexandras' father, the polemarch Olympieus. He himself had been killed, however, slain by a Persian arrow an hour before nightfall, just prior to the final clash with the Persian Immortals.

  Olympieus had taken shelter with his men on the rampart of the Wall, in the lee of the palisade, preparatory to arming himself for the day's final siege. Of all things, he was writing in his journal. The unburned timbers of the palisade protected him, he thought; he had stripped helmet and cuirass. But the arrow, guided by some perverse fate, pierced the single opening available to it, a space no wider than a man's hand. It struck Olympieus in the cervical spine, severing the spinal cord. He died minutes later, without regaining speech or consciousness, in his son's arms.

  With that, Alexandras had lost father and brother-in-law in a single afternoon.

  Among the Spartans, the most grievous casualties of the first day were suffered by the Knights.

  Of thirty, seventeen were either killed or incapacitated too severely to fight. Le-onidas was wounded six times but walked off the field under his own power. Astonishingly Polynikes, fighting all day in the forefront of the bloodiest action, had sustained no more than the slashes and lacerations incidental to action, a number of them doubtless inflicted by his own errant steel and that of his mates. He had, however, severely strained both hamstrings and pulled his left shoulder, simply from exertion and the excessive demands made upon the flesh in moments of supreme necessity. His squire, Akanthus, had been killed defending him, lucklessly like Olympieus, just minutes before the cessation of the day's slaughter.

  The second attack had commenced at noon. These were the mountain warriors of Cissia. None among the allies even knew where the hell this place was, but wherever it was, it bred men of ungodly valor. Cissia, the allies learned later, is a country of stem and hostile highlands not far from Babylon, dense with ravines and defiles. This contingent of the enemy, far from being daunted by the cliff wall of Kallidromos, took this obstacle in stride, clambering up and along its face, rolling stones down indiscriminately upon their own troops as well as the allies. I myself could not view this struggle directly, being stationed during that interval behind the Wall, all efforts consumed with tending my master's wounds and those of our pl
atoon and looking to their and my own necessaries. But I could hear it. It sounded like the whole mountain coming down.

  At one point, from where Dienekes and Alexandros were, in the Spartan camp a hundred feet rearward of the Wall, we could see the ready platoons, in this rotation the Mantinean and the Arkadians, pouring up to the battlements of the Wall and there hurling javelins, spears and even dismantled boulders down upon the attackers, who, in the elation of the triumph they thought at hand, were keening a bloodcurdling wail which I can only replicate as Elelelelele.

  The Thebans, we learned that evening, were the ones who threw back the Cissian assault. These warriors of Thebes held the right flank, as the allies saw it, alongside the sea cliffs. Their commander, Leontiades, and the picked champions fighting alongside him managed to secure a breach in the mob of the enemy, about forty feet out from the cliffs. The Thebans poured into this break and began shoving the cutoff ranks of the foe, about twenty files in breadth, toward the cliffs. Again the weight of the allied armor proved irresistible. The enemy right were rooted backward by the press of their own failing comrades. They toppled into the sea, as before in the rout of the Medes, clutching at the trousers, sword belts and finally the ankles of their fellows, pulling them over with them. The scale and celerity of the slaughter had clearly been massive, made more so by the ghastly manner in which the slain perished, that is, tumbling eighty and a hundred feet to have their bodies broken upon the rocks below or, escaping that, to drown in armor in the sea. Even from our position an eighth of a mile away and above the din of battle, we could hear plainly the cries of the falling men.

  The Sacae were the next nation elected by Xerxes to assault the allies. These massed below the Narrows around midafternoon. They were plainsmen and mountain men, warriors of the eastern empire, and the bravest of all the troops the allies faced. They fought with battle-axes and inflicted, for a time, the most grisly casualties upon the Greeks. Yet in the end their own courage was their undoing. They did not break or panic; they simply came on in wave after wave, clawing over the fallen bodies of their brothers to hurl themselves as if seeking their own slaughter upon the shields and iron spearpoints of the Greeks. Against these Sacae were arrayed at first the Mycenaeans, the Corinthians and the Phliasians, with the Spartans, Tegeates and Thespians in ready reserve. These last were flung into battle almost at once, as the Mycenaeans and Corinthians spent themselves in the mill of murder and became too exhausted to continue. The reserves likewise became shattered with fatigue and themselves had to be relieved by the third rotation of Orchomenians and other Arkadians, these last having barely gotten out of the previous melee and had time to gnaw a hard biscuit and gulp down a snootful of wine.

  By the time the Sacae broke, the sun was well over the mountain. The dance floor, now in full shadow, looked like a field ploughed by the oxen of hell. Not an inch remained unchurned and unriven. The rock-hard earth, sodden now with blood and piss and the unholy fluids which had spilled from the entrails of the slain and the butchered, lay churned in places to the depth of a man's calf. There is a spring sacred to Persephone, behind the sallyport adjacent to the Lakedaemonian camp, where in the morning, immediately following the repulsion of the Median assault, the Spartans and Thespians had collapsed in exhaustion and triumph. In that initial instant of salvation, however temporary all knew it must be, a flush of supreme joy had flooded over the entire allied camp. Panoplied men faced one another and slammed shields together, just for the joy of it, like boys rejoicing in the clamor of bronze upon bronze. I saw two warriors of the Arkadians standing face-to-face, pounding each other with fists upon the shoulders of their leathers, tears of joy streaming down their faces. Others whooped and danced. One warrior of the Phliasians grasped the corner of the redoubt with both hands and pounded his helmeted brow against the stone, bang bang bang, like a lunatic. Others writhed upon the ground, as horses will do sand-bathing, so overflushed with joy that they could discharge its excess in no other way.

  Simultaneously a second wave of emotion coursed through the camp. This was of piety. Men embraced one another, weeping in awe before the gods. Prayers of thanksgiving were sung from fervent hearts, and none took shame to voice them. Across the expanse of the camp, one saw knots of warriors kneeling in invocation, circles of a dozen with clasped hands, knots of three and four with arms around each other's shoulders, pairs crouching knee-to-knee and everywhere individuals upon the earth in prayer.

  Now, seven hours into the slaughter, all such observance of piety had fled. Men stared with hollow eyes upon the riven plain. Across this farmer's field of death lay sown such a crop of corpses and shields, hacked-up armor and shattered weapons, that the mind could not assimilate its scale nor the senses give it compass. The wounded, in numbers uncountable, groaned and cried out, writhing amid piles of limbs and severed body parts so intertangled one could not distinguish individual men, but the whole seemed a Gorgon-like beast of ten thousand limbs, some ghastly monster spawned by the cloven earth and now draining itself, fluid by fluid, back into that chthonic cleft which had given it birth. Along the face of the mountain the stone glistened scarlet to the height of a man's knee.

  The faces of the allied warriors had by this hour clotted into featureless masks of death. Blank eyes stared from sunken sockets as if the divine force, the daimon, had been extinguished like a lamp, replaced by a weariness beyond description, a stare without effect, the hollow gaze of hell itself. I turned to Alexandros; he looked fifty years old. In the mirror of his eyes I beheld my own face and could no longer recognize it.

  A temper toward the enemy now arose which had not been present before. This was not hatred but rather a refusal to reckon quarter. A reign of savagery began. Acts of barbarity which had been hitherto unthinkable now presented themselves to the mind and were embraced without a quibble. The theater of war, the stink and spectacle of carnage on such a scale, had so overwhelmed the senses with horror that the mind had grown numb and insensate. With perverse wit, it actually sought these and sought to intensify them.

  All knew that the next attack would be the day's last; nightfall's curtain would adjourn the slaughter until tomorrow. It was also clear that whichever force the foe next threw into the line would be his finest, the cream saved for this hour when the Hellenes labored in exhaustion and stood the likeliest chance of being overthrown by fresh troops. Leoni-das, who had not slept now in more than forty hours, yet prowled the lines of defenders, assembling each allied unit and addressing it in person. Remember, brothers: the final fight is everything. All we have achieved so far this day is lost if we do not prevail now, at the end. Fight as you have never fought before.

  In the intervals between the first three assaults, each warrior readying for the next engagement had striven to scour clean the face of his shield and helmet, to present again to the foe the gleaming terror-inspiring surface of bronze. As the threshing mill of murder progressed throughout the day, however, this housekeeping became honored increasingly in the breach, as each knurl and inlay on the shield acquired a grisly encrustment of blood and dirt, mud and excrement, fragments of tissue, flesh, hair and gore of every description. Besides, the men were too tired. They didn't care anymore. Now Dithyrambos, the Thespian captain, sought to make a virtue of necessity. He ordered his men to cease from burnishing their shields, and instead to paint and streak them, and the men's own body armor, with yet more blood and gore.

  This Dithyrambos, by trade an architect and by no means a professional soldier, had already distinguished himself with such magnificent courage throughout the day that the prize of valor, it was a foregone conclusion, would be his by acclamation. His gallantry had elevated him second only to Leoni-das in prestige among the men. Dithyrambos now, stationing himself in the open in full view of all the men, proceeded to smear his own shield, which was already nearly black with dried blood, with yet more gore and guts and fresh dripping fluid. The allies in line, the Thespians, Tegeates and Man-tineans, ghoulishly followed suit. The S
partans alone abstained, not out of delicacy or decorum, but simply in obedience to their own laws of campaign, which command them to adhere without alteration to their customary disciplines and practices of arms.

  Dithyrambos now ordered the squires and servants to hold their places, to refrain from sweeping the advance ground of enemy bodies. Instead, he sent his own men out onto the arena with orders to heap the corpses in display in the most ghoulish manner possible, so as to present to the next wave of the foe, whose marshaling trumpets could already be heard around the shoulder of the Narrows, the most ghastly and terrifying spectacle possible.

  Brothers and allies, my own beautiful dogs from hell! he addressed the warriors, striding helmetless before the lines, his voice carrying powerfully even to those upon the Wall and marshaling in the ready-ground behind. This next wave will be the day's last. Cinch up your balls, men, for one final surpassing effort. The enemy believes us exhausted and anticipates dispatching us to the underworld beneath his onslaught of fresh, rested troops. What he doesn't know is we're already there. We crossed the line hours ago. He gestured to the Narrows and its carpeting of horror. We stand already in hell. It is our home!