Sword of the Spartan

by Mike Rogers

  Every night I gazed across the plains of Corinth from its walls and watched the thousands of campfires spread around the military compound and I'd recall the number of active men in our service: five hundred thousand infantry and one hundred thousand cavalry.

  The numbers were staggering, the logistics to supply this army incomprehensible and the sight of it overwhelming.

  But if there was anything even more overwhelming that year then it would be your birth, Alexander. You, my son, born in Corinth. It was the proudest day of my life.

  I will never forget the day Minerva, your mother, told me she was with child, and I will never forget the day you were born. The moment your mother felt the first contraction she was whisked away by servants of the palace and put in the bed that had once belonged to the king of Corinth himself. Anaxis had arranged that we would never be short of anything and this was part of it. The bed of a king, his physicians and the presence of the mighty Anaxis himself. As soon as he heard he came to us, and he was the second man to hold you in his arms. He wept like a child and so did I as we heard your strong cry and to my surprise he wrapped you in a scarlet cloak. The symbol of it was clear to all in the room. This boy, born out of two slaves, was to be a Spartan warrior. You, Alexander, were to be a Spartan.

  As you settled on your mother's breast for the first time and drank the warm mother's milk, Anaxis had a second surprise. He proposed a name for you.

  Alexander, he said. Alexander of Macedon would be but a pale reference to what you were to become. You, Alexander, would be destined to be Anaxis successor as president of The League. You were to inherit all of Greece and if Anaxis succeeded all of Rome as well. At that time I could not see why Anaxis would do such a thing for a mere slave, even if this slave was his best friend. Certainly, Anaxis had never fathered a child, despite his age. I wondered if he was perhaps destined by the gods not to bring forth any children, and there was a possibility he too thought of it that way. It was not improbable, just very unlikely. And still, it stuck. I could never quite remove the idea from my head that there was something wrong here. And every time I saw Anaxis look at you I got that strange feeling again. Every time he brought you a new toy I wondered why he was so kind to you where he was the stern Spartan general to everyone else. One night I even found him stooped over your cradle with tears in his eyes.

  When I guided him out of the room and asked him what was going on he looked at me and said, “I cannot fail, Trimidites. I cannot fail for the children of Greece. They must have a better future than we have had a past. For children like Alexander we must destroy Rome.”

  I asked no further. Time and events did not allow it. By now all of Rome had been turned into a military state. Every coinage that ended up in the Senate's hands was used for the upcoming war effort. Men were drafted and trained. Women and children were taught how to best slash their wrists if taken captive by the Romans, or to commit suicide in other various ways if a blade was not available. Rome was morally a defeated nation and ours the victor.

  After having formed a massive army, Anaxis started the construction of a gigantic navy. The staggering amounts of one thousand ships were to be drafted for the defense of Greece. Within seven months we had them. Purchased from other nations, built on our own, confiscated from Romans or simply bribing Mistra's pirate friends into working for us, it delivered results and fast. Again Rome cowered behind its walls and pulled back all its vessels to Italy for its defense. But Rome did not merely cower. It sought ways to defeat us without arms. Bribes found their way throughout Greece, but Anaxis simply laughed at it and openly declared that all Roman bribes were free of taxes if simply declared to the state.

  The Greeks frowned, until Anaxis added the second part of the deal.

  If not declared and intercepted by Greek agents, those who the bribes were destined for would suffer a death most horrible: they were to be boiled alive.

  Anaxis' threat worked. Not only were the bribes declared, people handed them over to us. Our coffers swelled even more, and Anaxis laughed out loud as he heard me say the total amount was no less than a million Talents.

  The second measure Rome took was to put a price on Anaxis' head. One hundred thousand Talents. A staggering sum for any mortal. Anaxis was not happy with this development, on the contrary. He sent a letter to the Roman Senate to express how he felt about this bounty.

  The message was typically Spartan: short and laconic.

  "One hundred thousand Talents is a fucking insult. I'm worth at least five times that much."

  As the messenger who delivered the letter returned to us he had said how the entire Roman Senate had been baffled for at least ten full minutes. The first to find his voice again had simply stated, “We don't have that much left.”

  The assembled generals who heard the messenger's words burst out in laughter and slapped each other on the back. Anaxis was not only good at battle and politics; he seemed to be a master in psychological warfare as well. The confidence in the Spartan only grew and more men wished to join our cause.

  Another year passed and you were learning to take your first steps when disaster struck Greece.

  On the first day on the month known to the Romans as Juno, the Roman gathered forces boarded their fleet and set course for Greece. One hundred fifty thousand full-blooded Roman legionnaires and three hundred thousand auxiliary forces stepped off the Italian peninsula and vanished. Our spies sent word that they had left but to what destination none knew. In Greece, Anaxis merely rubbed his little beard and ordered the fleet to engage whatever Roman ship they could find. And then all turned quiet. No vessel was sighted, no messengers or spies intercepted, no more bribes paid. Nothing.

  It was as if Rome had vanished off the face of the earth. Our generals worried and discussed the matter, uneasy because of the lack of intelligence. Deopus voiced the matter the best.

  “Damned, we cannot fight ghosts! We need an enemy! We need to know where they will land so we can position our forces. Will they touch down in Sparta? In Athens? In Macedonia? We are defenseless at the moment!”

  Anaxis arose from his seat and immediately the room turned quiet.

  “Ghosts, Deopus?” he asked with that cool voice of his. An ice-cold breeze passed through the room and I shuddered.

  “The Romans are not ghosts. They are merely more cautious than in the past. They have silenced the informants, killed the spies, wrecked every vessel that spots their fleet, but that is all. They are not the demons that haunt you in your sleep, for those are the true ghosts of the men you have slain. But these are not ghosts. They will come and they will die. And if you are brave enough to charge that steed of yours into a thousand Roman spears then you should be brave enough to sit this one out. They will land. They will wreck a city or two before we will be able to meet them, but they will be destroyed. And that, my friend, is a promise.”

  The meeting was over. The generals returned to their own houses, assured by Anaxis. They all remembered how he had had a plan or two up his sleeve at the battle of Epirus and they were counting that he had one this time. When the last of the officers had left I turned to Anaxis and said, “They think you know something they don't.”

  He nodded.

  “But you don't. You're just as worried as they are.”

  He nodded again and stared at the ground. “These Italian sons of farmers…they bring an army unlike any they have ever raised. How they did it, I marvel at it every day. And if they manage to raise an army as large as ours, Trimidites, then I fear they have a man of my qualities to lead it as well. And if the numbers are equal and the leaders just as cunning, then it will be valor that decides the outcome.”

  He turned around and walked to his room. I shouted, “And which one of us has the greatest valor?”

  He stopped, but did not turn.

  “That,” he said, “will be decided by the last man standing on a field of dead.”

  Again I shuddered. I understood now that Anaxis had never had the ambition
to head directly to Rome. He had been waiting all this time for the Romans to come to us. Only when this army had been destroyed could he afford to send troops to Italy. It was one big gamble. We either won or lost. There was no alternative option.

  You must understand, Alexander, that I did not want this war. I opposed it more than any man. And yet, now that it had begun, I could not forsake my duties. I worked to the best of my abilities to feed the army, to give them armor and weapons so that they might vanquish Rome once and for all. And maybe then the madness could stop.

  Maybe…

  How wrong I was…

  Chapter 10

  Krateros, who by now had been a full general of a quarter of our cavalry, came barging into the royal palace of Corinth, still on his horse. He rode his steed up the stairs and into the study where Anaxis and I were discussing food rations for the army. The both of us stared at the young man incomprehensively until he blurted out, “Romans…landed!”

  Anaxis stormed to the exhausted young man and grabbed him by the shoulders.

  “Where? Where did they land?”

  Krateros gasped for air and whispered, “Macedonia.”

  Anaxis and I looked each other in the eye and we both knew this was bad. Our army was in Corinth, the Romans in Macedonia. At best it would take two full weeks before we could get there. The Romans would have done a considerable amount of damage by that time.

  “How many?” Anaxis asked, while he held Krateros up with a single hand.

  The young man stared at us with a glint of fear in his eyes. As he spoke, I could clearly hear it, and I realized the situation must have seemed bad to the young man.

  “All of them. Every single Roman soldier they could dish up…Close to half a million.”

  Anaxis sighed and looked at me.

  “It would seem the Romans have put all of their eggs in one basket. Trimidites, tell the generals to board the men. We're sailing for Macedon.”

  That night, as I stood aside your cradle, Alexander, and couldn't help but wonder how all this would end. If we pulled it off, it would mean freedom for Greece. If we failed it would be slavery and death for all. The lucky ones would be the dead.

  I stayed behind with Anaxis, despite the fact he told me I was free to leave. Again he offered me the opportunity to turn around and walk away from the madness.

  Again I refused.

  Why?

  I do not know. There are many reasons why a Spartan slave follows his master into

  death. Pride, honor, necessity, circumstances…

  Mine would be friendship. Anaxis and I were closer than any brother and if we were to walk in Hades, we would walk together.

  The following morning I found to my surprise that my ordinary clothes had been replaced for those of a Spartan Hoplite. No servants were in sight to ask questions, so I decided to put it on.

  As I exited my room, I found several dozen men wearing the same outfit and I wondered if Anaxis had something to do with this. I met Deopus and Krateros, both wearing the same armor. None knew why they had been issued this outfit, only that they were to wear it.

  All of the generals walked into Anaxis' room and asked him about it but he did not give them any answers. He merely stated that these were their clothes as of now and that they were all to wear their helmets when on the move. I frowned and so did many others. Nevertheless, you did not say no to a man like Anaxis. The clothes remained.

  Two weeks later our army set foot on Macedonian soil. Our assembled fleet of a thousand ships carried the army at neck-breaking speed to our destination and within a few hours the entire army was on the move. It was not hard to follow the Romans; we merely had to follow the path of destruction. They had left Macedon behind like a field infested by locusts. Bodies lay everywhere, houses were burned to the ground and cities wrecked. Survivors were nowhere to be found. Only after marching for five days or so, one of our scouts came crashing into Anaxis' bodyguard.

  “They're gone!” he shouted. “The Roman bastards are gone!”

  Immediately our men started crying, What? and How is this possible? but Anaxis silenced them by a simply raising his hand.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. The scout pointed at the direction we came from and said, “I talked to some survivors up ahead, my lord. Apparently the Roman army turned around as it reached the borders of Epirus and went back to the sea. They're heading back to their fleet.”

  Deopus turned red in anger and shouted, “Impossible! We would have met them!”

  Anaxis rubbed his cheek and said, “Not necessarily. If they went down south in the middle of the night and marched for two days without forming camp they might have pulled it off.”

  “But why stop at Epirus and turn back?” I asked.

  Anaxis shook his head. “That is a mystery. Wrecking Epirus would have been highly symbolical for Rome, and yet they left it alone. In fact, why turn back to the ocean and not head further south to Athens?”

  The scout interrupted Anaxis, risking a serious whipping by doing so, and said, “ I apologize, my lord, but I got this information from the governor of Epirus. He sent messengers to meet our army, and they carried a letter for you.”

  The scout held out a sealed letter and Anaxis quickly ripped it open. As he read it I watched my master turn pale and I knew the news was bad. Extremely bad.

  “The Roman bastards…” Anaxis muttered.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  Anaxis looked around, each general directly in the eyes and said, “Philipus, governor of Epirus, has inside the walls of the city some hundred thousand refugees. They all say that the Romans are being led by a man more animal than human, named Consul Lucius Mummius. He has been sent to Greece with orders from the Roman Senate to crush the rebellion, put every man, woman, and child to the sword and to plunder freely throughout Greece. He also sent a message to Philipus for yours truly. It says, Tell the Spartan we will meet soon enough. Well now, we shouldn't disappoint Consul Mummius, now should we?”

  The generals nodded in grim determination and the army went on the march again. For three days we followed the road to the south, still not picking up any sign of the Roman legions. But on the fourth day something happened that turned the war around. As the army entered a small pass through the mountains the generals rode in front and behind Anaxis, serving as his bodyguard in case of an attack. All of us were still wearing the same armor and helmets and it was only by voice, posture and horse that I knew the names of all the generals. Just as we were about to leave the mountain pass I heard a distinct zipping sound and saw something shoot by me. The man riding in front of me, a Beotian mercenary general named Zaktos, let out a holler of pain and fell of his horse. Even before the poor man's lifeless body had touched the ground I realized he had been shot, and I launched myself off my horse. I pulled my shield off the side of the horse and held it tight. Another zipping sound followed and this time it was Deopus who was the target, but the arrow missed him and struck his horse. The poor animal went berserk of anguish and Deopus had all the trouble in the world from keeping the animal slamming into the rocks.

  Suddenly a commanding voice which I recognized as that of Anaxis sounded throughout the pass, “A sniper! Take out your shields and get your back against your horse for cover!”

  The men in front of us and behind us quickly realized what was going on and started climbing the steep mountain walls to get the sniper. A few minutes later a grinning group of Spartans came towards us, holding a severely beaten Roman soldier. The man was unconscious and bleeding from several wounds, but none were lethal.

  Anaxis thanked the men who apprehended the assassin and ordered me to put him in a cage on one of the carts. Later that night he'd be interrogated, he said. I realized that meant torture, but after the ordeal we had just gone through I cared little for that detail. As things settled down again and we continued our way I started thinking about the assassination attempt. It was only then that I understood why Anaxis had ordered all of the hig
her officers to wear the same clothing. It wasn't to indicate our unity, it was to fool assassins. Zaktos had been the distinctive proof that it worked. As of that day the men started paying more attention to assassination attempts and strangers were shunned from the camp. No more incidents took place.

  But what of the Roman assassin, you ask? That night Anaxis had the man hung by his thumbs above a campfire and started cutting him between the ribs to break his resistance. He wanted to know specifics on numbers, supplies, routes, officers. But the most important question was why the legions turned back to the sea.

  After five hours of non-stop torture the assassin broke. His screams had been haunting the men for half the night now and I for one was glad to see it was over. I watched Anaxis stab his dagger for the thirtieth time between the man's ribs and finally the Roman pig squealed.

  “Enough! I beg you! Stop! I will tell you where the legions are heading!”

  Anaxis grinned and pushed his blade a bit deeper between the man's ribs and said, “Don’t even think about lying to me, you fucking bastard.”

  The Roman moaned in agony, and Anaxis pulled out his flask of wine, held it in front of the man and said, “You can have some wine, food and medical attention if you tell me where Mummius is headed.”

  To my surprise the Roman pig started laughing. The men stared at the prisoner and muttered that the man's mind had snapped under the torture. Some of them drew their blade to put him out of his misery.

  But then the prisoner blurted out, “By now it will be safe for me to speak. It will make no more difference, Spartan. You are doomed. Greece is doomed. Your children will be sold as slaves, your women will serve as whores in the Roman legionary brothels and you will all be turned to dog food! Your bones will be left to bleach in the sun! Corinth will burn! Burn!”

  And then I saw Anaxis raise his head and stare at the man with his eyes wide open. He understood now where Mummius was headed.