A Peerless Peer

by Helena P. Schrader

  Brotus flung himself into the melee in the dark with frantic fury. He had to wipe out the shame of letting that Argive bitch seduce him. He should have killed her. Why hadn’t he just killed her? She had bewitched him! The vile, sex-crazed succubus! But he had kept his helmet down. Dienekes could not have recognized him, he consoled himself. No one would ever know about the incident. He would redeem himself with blood. So he slashed and hacked and gutted anything that came in his way.

  By midafternoon Kastor Company had begun their descent to the coast. Informants had reported that the Argive ships were sheltered inside a steep gorge that emptied into the sea near the village they were now approaching. The gorge, their informant had told them, was so deep that the masts of the Argive ships did not rise above the edge. The base of the gorge was allegedly shallow and sandy, allowing the Argive ships to rest softly. The mouth of the gorge, however, was so narrow it could not be seen unless one was looking straight into it.

  No sooner had they reached the coast than they were again confronted by destruction. It came in the form of a small farmstead that for some reason—perhaps a sudden burst of rain or a too-hastily lit fire—had not been gutted by the flames. This meant that the bodies of the victims were rotting out in the open. The stench was vile, and Leonidas was not the only one to taste his breakfast in his throat. Sperchias couldn’t keep it down at all and was sick. A child was draped over a stone wall like a discarded chiton, his or her limbs swollen like sausages from decay. An infant had been strung up by his feet from a ceiling beam and slit open. His guts hung out of his open belly across his face and a heap of innards lay on the floor beneath him, buzzing with flies. His mother lay spread-eagled on the floor. Her face was turned toward the infant, petrified in expressive agony. A hammer handle had been jammed up her vagina. The image would haunt those who saw it for the rest of their lives.

  They dug graves and wrapped their himations around their mouths and noses as they got the corpses onto planks and set them in the earth. There were four children all together. The two men, apparently brothers, had at least died fighting, but they had been hacked to pieces in the process.

  “If Greeks can do this, what is it like to fight barbarians?” Sperchias asked Leonidas when they at last turned their backs on the Farm of Horrors (as Leonidas would always remember it).

  “Did you know them?”

  Sperchias shook his head. “Our property is much further south.” He gestured vaguely with his arm. “Now I am afraid to go there.”

  They reached a wide, sandy beach and, careful to mount sentries, they stacked their arms ready for rapid use. Then the men were allowed to swim while the helots prepared the evening meal.

  Leonidas and Sperchias swam out together into the swells. “What is the point of torturing people for sport?” Sperchias asked rhetorically. “I can understand doing it to get information, but what more could they take from those people? They took away everything they had lived for and loved, and then they took their lives. Why did they have to torture them first? They weren’t even Spartan! If they did it to us, maybe you could call it revenge. But these were perioikoi! What could that young mother ever have done to the Argives to justify what they did to her?”

  “Nothing. Nothing could justify what they did to her. Nothing,” Leonidas repeated, and they swam back to shore as the sky grew purple with the sunset.

  They were woken in the middle of the night again, and it started to dawn on Leonidas that this was a deliberate policy. Sparta forbade the use of artificial outdoor lighting in the city, and the Spartan agoge and army trained for night maneuvers, but most other Greeks were uncomfortable moving—much less fighting—in darkness. Attacking at night gave the Spartans an advantage. Furthermore, the use of darkness enabled them to disguise their movements and their weakness in numbers.

  They were given orders to keep silent to the extent possible, but to don full panoply. Their attendants were likewise ordered to arm themselves with whatever missile weapons they had; some had bows, Mantiklos his sling. They were then informed in whispers by their section leaders that the Argive ships had been located. The ships were protected by a “substantial body of troops.” The sides of the gorge were too steep to enable any approach except at the mouth—where, obviously, the Argives had set up sentries. Those attendants who were good with bow, javelin, or sling were sent up onto the heights above the gorge to shoot down into it as soon as it became light enough to distinguish friend from foe. The hoplites were going to have to make a direct assault up the mouth of the gorge to seize control of the ships.

  The certainty that he was about to face combat for the first time in his life put Leonidas’ nerves on edge. He had felt cheated when the boar broke his arm and he had been ordered back to Sparta the previous year; and since landing on Kythera a fight had seemed probable, but not—until now—certain. The moment of truth was at hand.

  This had been his destiny since birth—since the day the elders agreed to let him live because he was presumed healthy enough to grow up to perform this function. Certainly he had been training himself for this moment since the age of four or five, when he had first started to absorb the stories and the ethos of the civilization that nurtured him. More concretely, the last eight years had been spent in intensive and highly specialized training for this event. But he had not been tested. Now, before dawn, he would find out if he was worthy of all the efforts invested in his upbringing.

  As they left camp, Leonidas was pursued by nagging doubts. Maybe he was as worthless as his mother and elder brothers had always asserted. If he failed in any way today, it would certainly prove them right—and he was certain he would not be able to live with himself.

  Marching in a file just two wide and fifty men long, they followed a narrow trail that skirted the edge of the steep cliffs until they came to the mouth of the gorge. Here the cliffs turned sharply inland, and the mouth of the gorge lay low and white before them; but although the cliffs were gone, the winter storms had heaped up loose stones and sand into a tall bank that was cut only in the very middle, where a stream emptied its water into the sea.

  They continued forward to cut off the entire mouth of the gorge; but just when the first four or five pairs of men had crossed the stream, a shout and then a blazing arrow lit up the sky. One of the Argive sentries had sighted them.

  Instantly the men who had crossed the stream turned back and rejoined the main body of troops. Although they could not see the enemy, they could hear shouts, horns, and the clatter of arms. To Leonidas’ inexperienced ears, it sounded like hundreds of men. Already they were being ordered to advance four deep and twenty-five across rather than take another two to three minutes to form up twelve by eight. What this meant was that Leonidas and the other novices found themselves in the rear of the four ranks rather than in the middle.

  Leonidas didn’t have much time to think about it. Advancing up the steep bank was treacherous. The stones rolled and slid under their feet, sometimes giving way and dragging them down. The line was not as firm and solid as it should be. Furthermore, the steepness of the incline made it impossible for the men behind to lean their shields into the backs of the men ahead and help them. The ranks became increasingly separated.

  And then, to his horror, Leonidas registered that the Argives were pouring down the bank on their left, just beyond the stream. There appeared to be hundreds of them, all shouting and howling with rage like a pack of wolves. Sperchias, with Leonidas immediately to his right, was on the far left-hand side of the Spartan formation, and so was closest to the Argives. Leonidas could see the Argives start to form up, and he realized that in a matter of moments they would be in a position to fall upon the Spartans from the rear. Worse, if the Spartans continued their advance, they would find themselves trapped inside the gorge by the Argives.

  The order to counter-march did not come a moment too soon. At a single command, the Spartan line reversed direction, and the order for double-time was unnecessary. They were all stumblin
g, falling, and sliding down the slope, the stones shifting under them, clattering and rolling. Here and there, little individual rock-slides half buried the men in front; and as some men were brought to their knees, the men behind them couldn’t stop sliding and falling, so that the whole formation lost its cohesion.

  Sperchias gave a shout of surprise as much as pain, and Leonidas saw him go down, the shaft of a javelin sticking up into the air. The man behind him made one attempt to grab Sperchias, but his feet were sliding with the stones, and the men behind him were pressing down on him. Leonidas only had a split second, but he managed to get hold of Sperchias under his arm and dragged him upward and forward in a single motion. He had not stopped. He was riding the rolling stones more than anything, acutely aware that his back was exposed to the enemy. The javelin throwers …

  At last he felt the earth firm up under his feet as he reached the bottom of the bank of stones. Gasping, his pulse pounding in his temples, sweat dripping into his eyes, he started running. He was still half-dragging Sperchias, although the other man had somehow managed to get his feet under him and was hobbling forward as fast as he could. Together they plunged into the breaking surf on the beach.

  The head of the javelin was still lodged in Sperchias’ thigh, but the shaft had broken off in the landslide. Sperchias cried out once as the salt sea water washed into his wound, but already the order to reverse again had rung out; this time the orders were for files of eight. Leonidas and Sperchias found themselves in the middle again, their leaders and the best men ahead of them, the rest of the older men behind them. Overhead a purple tinge lighted the sky and turned the whitecaps pinkish out in the bay.

  Leonidas was relieved to hear the sound of shields clacking into position in an unbroken line, because already the Argives were nearing them. They were coming not as a phalanx in slow march, but running triumphantly in a disorganized horde.

  The Spartans had hardly taken up their stance before Leonidas was staggered, even in his position three men back, by the onslaught of the Argives. All along the Spartan line, men grunted in surprise and effort as they leaned into their shields to break the momentum of the Argives. Sperchias let out an involuntary cry as the sudden pressure on his wounded thigh sent a searing pain up his body. Leonidas could see nothing but the back of his shield as he held it in the back of the man ahead of him for what seemed like eternity. His shoulder and calf muscles were tensed to the point of cramping. He was acutely aware that beside him, Sperchias was gasping with pain as he tried to stand despite his leg wound.

  And then, incomprehensibly to Leonidas, they were ordered forward. With a Herculean effort they took a step, leaning forward, pushing against the man ahead and propelled forward by the man behind. The first step was the hardest. The second was just a fraction easier. The third was notably easier. And the fourth and fifth. They were stepping over Argive bodies now, and Leonidas brought his spear into play for the first time, jabbing downward with the butt to stop the writhing and wriggling of the Argives they were walking over. He didn’t think about it particularly; it was a motion they had drilled a thousand times.

  They were advancing up the bank again, but slowly; in a compact unit it seemed easier somehow. One step at a time, they went up the treacherous slope until, abruptly, they were over the crest and the order came to pause. Leonidas needed to catch his breath, and Sperchias was crumpling slowly on his left. Diodoros ordered the wounded to fall out, and wherever a man was missing, the men behind moved forward so that the phalanx was again compact and dense. Then they started down the bank into the Argive camp.

  Leonidas had no sense of the total picture, but they were advancing down a much shallower slope than they had gone up, and the walls of the gorge were closing in. The sky overhead was lightening, and the darkness of the shadows seemed more intense.

  The Argives were no longer fighting. They were in flight. Leonidas could hear shouts and the cracking of underbrush coming from farther up the slopes to left and right.

  The bows of a ship loomed up in front to the left, and soon they were marching past the big merchantman, beached here as if tossed up by a storm and left listing to port. They squeezed between two other ships, penteconters, and kept moving forward until they were at the very edge of a fast-flowing stream and the walls of the gorge were almost closing over their heads. There was no sign of Argives anywhere.

  Diodoros ordered a halt and allowed them to rest their shields on the ground, prop their spears in the sand by their butt ends, and drop down onto one knee behind their hoplons. It was a huge relief to arms and shoulders to share the weight of the shield with the earth. Drinking water was passed out to the hoplites by those attendants not above them on the heights of the gorge.

  But before they had fully caught their breath, shouting from overhead broke out. They looked up. Their attendants were calling and pointing. The Spartans looked back and saw that the two penteconters they had passed earlier were lurching forward. Some of the Argives had evidently managed to circle back to the ships and were now trying to launch them.

  Yet again they reversed their direction and started down the gorge on the double. But with daylight breaking over the valley more and more, they were seen almost at once. The Argives scrambled aboard their ships, pulling the ladders inboard with them. A moment later the Spartans had surrounded the two ships, and the Argives were firing missiles and insults at them.

  Diodoros ordered his troops to withdraw out of javelin range and called the enomotarchs over to consult. To Leonidas, the thought of trying to assault the ships was intimidating. It was no easy thing to board a ship. To do so against opposition and without so much as a ladder seemed impossible. But Leonidas knew they would be asked to do it.

  “Do you think shouting and banging one’s shield really makes one braver?” Aristandos asked, frowning.

  “It must,” Leonidas concluded. The silence that their own training and ethos required of them certainly only allowed fears to fester and nerves to tense almost beyond endurance. Leonidas kept eyeing the steep sides of the Argive ships and trying to imagine climbing up them in full armor. If they attacked amidships where the freeboard was lowest, they would also be at that part of the ship where the Argives could muster the most men to oppose their assault. If they tried to attack bow or stern, where there was room only for a handful of defenders to block their way, they would have to scramble up almost twelve feet. Leonidas did not know how it could be done.

  The sun broke over the horizon behind them, and sunlight was reflected brilliantly off the Argive shields. Almost immediately afterward, the first missiles started to rain down from the edges of the gorge. The Lacedaemonian light troops were at the extreme edge of their range and their weapons were not very effective, but at least they had the effect of making the Argives duck and throw their shields up, some of their swagger shattered.

  Diodoros appeared. He walked along in front of their line, his helmet shoved back so they could see his face, and stopped in the middle. “We have two options,” he announced conversationally, his back contemptuously turned toward the enemy to show he feared them not at all. “We can assault the ships and try to capture them and whatever loot they have aboard, or we can burn them. Burning will cost us little and is a horrible way to die.”

  “It’s what they’ve done to the poor people here,” one of the older men pointed out.

  “Indeed. But Lacedaemon could use those ships.”

  “Then let’s take them,” Aristandos shouted out in a burst of youthful bluster, and Leonidas looked at him, frowning. He didn’t value this kind of thoughtless bravery.

  “Your bark is worse than your bite, puppy,” one of the front rankers snarled back, but no one actually voiced a contrary opinion.

  “This enomotia is in favor of assault?” Diodoros asked, his eyes sweeping along their line, seeking each man’s eyes. Several men in the front rank shrugged. Again Aristandos replied in the affirmative. No one contradicted him. Leonidas wondered if he were
the only one reluctant to attack. Maybe his fears were a reflection of his lack of leadership abilities? Maybe he was a coward. No one else seemed to be afraid of the assault. He held his tongue.

  Satisfied, Diodoros went on to the next enomotia, and shortly afterward Leonidas’ enomotia was charged with seizing one of the two penteconters. Planking had been dragged from somewhere, possibly from the “Farm of Horrors,” and a couple of grapples with rope had been found as well. One was given to Leonidas’ enomotarch.

  The latter announced that he would lead up the plank, and asked who wished to have the grapple. Aristandos volunteered. No one fought him for the honor. Leonidas thought that was a bad sign. Aristandos was, after all, still relatively inexperienced. Surely there were veteran hoplites who could climb up the rope of the grapple in armor and fight single-handedly on gaining the deck? If none of them were prepared to take the risk, then the risk must be very high, he reflected.

  They prepared for the assault. Spears would be useless. Swords were the only weapon for this kind of work. “It’s up to you whether you want both hands to climb up the plank or want to go up with sword drawn,” their enomotarch told them. Their shields, however, were slung over their backs to protect them from missiles and blows as they scaled up the plank.

  They formed up in the order of the assault. The enomotarch went first, followed by the other men in the order of their ranks: the best first, the youngest in the middle, and the other older men behind, with the deputy commander, Euragoras, bringing up the rear. Leonidas’ position—now that both Sperchias and Aristandos were out of the line—was eighth from the rear. It was not the place of honor, but he did not resent it.

  The assault was signaled by pipe. There was no beating of shields and no battle cry. They did not even sing the paean to Kastor. They ran forward, secured the planking, and rushed to get enough men onto the board to make it too heavy for the Argives to push off at the top. The enomotarch was the first man off the plank, and he was instantly surrounded. It was up to the rest of them to keep pouring up the plank to ensure that he was not overwhelmed.