Give him nothing, Alexandros, I hissed.
But the boy perceived the precariousness of our predicament. Of course, Captain. It will be my pleasure.
The pirate accepted his fare, grinning like Charon on the ferry to hell. Now, lads. Over the side with you.
We were smack in the middle of the widest part of the gulf.
Our boatman indicated the Spartan cutter bearing swiftly down. Catch a line and keep under the stem while I feed these lubbers a yard of shit. The beards loomed. Soon as we talk these fools off, we'll haul you back aboard none the worse for wear.
Over we went. Up came the cutter. We heard the scrape of a knife blade through rope.
The line came off in our hands.
Happy landings, lads!
In a flash the smack's steering oar bit deep into the swell, the two worthless brutes suddenly showed themselves anything but. Three swift heaves on the driving oars and the smack shot off like a sling bullet.
We were cast adrift in the middle of the channel.
The cutter came up, calling after the smack as she sped from sight. The Spartans still hadn't seen us. Alexandras clamped my arm. We must not sing out, that would mean dishonor.
I agree. Drowning's a lot more honorable.
Shut up.
We held silent, treading water while the cutter quartered the area, scanning for other craft that might be spies. Finally she showed her stern and rowed off. We were alone beneath the stars.
As vast as the sea can look from the deck of a ship, it looks even bigger from a single handbreadth above the surface.
Which shore do we make for?
Alexandros gave me a look as if I had lost my senses. Of course we would go forward.
We paddled for what seemed like hours. The shore had not crawled one spear-length closer.
What if the current's against us? For all we know we're stuck here in place, or even drifting backward.
We're closer, Alexandros insisted.
Your eyes must be better than mine.
There was nothing to do but paddle and pray. What monsters of the sea prowled at this moment beneath our feet, ready to snare our legs in their horrible coils, or shear us off at the kneecaps? I could hear Alexandros gulp water, fighting an asthmatic fit.
We pulled closer together. Our eyes were gumming up from the salt; our arms felt like lead.
Tell me a story, Alexandros said.
For a moment I feared he was going mad.
To encourage each other. Keep our spirits up. Tell me a story.
I recited some verses from the Iliad which Bruxieus had made Diomache and me commit to memory, our second summer in the hills. I was getting the hexameters out of order but Alexandros didn't care; the words seemed to fortify him greatly.
Dienekes says the mind is like a house with many rooms, he said. There are rooms one must not go into. To anticipate one's death is one of those rooms. We must not allow ourselves even to think it.
He instructed me to continue, selecting only verses of valor. He declared that we must under no circumstances give thought to failure. I think the gods may have dropped us here on purpose. To teach us about those rooms.
We paddled on. Orion the Hunter had stood overhead when we began; now his arc descended, halfway down the sky, The shore stood as far off as ever.
Do you know Agathe, Ariston's sister? Alexandros asked out of nowhere. I'm going to marry her. I've never told anyone that.
Congratulations.
You think I'm joking. But my thoughts have kept coming back to her for hours, or however long we've been out here. He was serious. Do you think she'll have me?
It made as much sense to debate this in the middle of the ocean as anything else. Your family outranks hers. If your father asks, hers will have to say yes.
I don't want her that way. You've watched her. Tell me the truth. Will she have me? I considered it. She made you that amber charm. Her eyes never leave you when you sing. She comes out to the Big Ring with her sisters when we run. She pretends to be training, but she's really sneaking looks at you.
This seemed to cheer Alexandros mightily. Let's make a push. Twenty minutes as strong as we can, and see how far we can get.
When we hit twenty, we decided to try for another.
You have a girl you love too, don't you? Alexandros asked as we paddled. From your city.
The girl you lived in the hills with, your cousin who went to Athens.
I said it was impossible that he could know all that.
He laughed. I know everything. I hear it from the girls and the goat boys and from your helot friend Dekton. He said he wanted to know more about this girl of yours.
I told him I wouldn't tell him.
I can help you to see her. My great-uncle is proxenos for Athens. He can have her found, and brought to the city if you wish.
The swells were getting bigger; a cold wind had gotten up. We were going nowhere. I supported Alexandros again as another choking fit attacked him. He stuck his thumb between his teeth and bit through the flesh till it bled. The pain seemed to steady him. Dienekes says that warriors advancing into battle must speak steadily and calmly to each other, each man encouraging his mate. We have to keep talking, Xeo.
The mind plays tricks in conditions of such extremity. I cannot tell how much I spoke aloud to Alexandros over the succeeding hours and how much simply swam before memory's eye as we labored endlessly toward the shore that refused to come closer.
I know I told him of Bruxieus. If my knowledge of Homer was worthy, all credit lay with this fortune-cursed man, sightless as the poet himself, and his fierce will that I and my cousin not grow to adulthood wild and unlettered in the hills.
This man was mentor to you, Alexandros pronounced gravely, as Dienekes is to me. He wished to hear more. What was it like to lose mother and father, to watch your city burn? How long did you and your cousin remain in the hills? How did you get food, and how protect yourself from the elements and wild beasts?
In gulps and snatches, I told him.
By our second summer in the mountains, Diomache and I had become such accomplished hunters that not only did we no longer need to descend to town or farm for food, we no longer wished to.
We were happy in the hills. Our bodies were growing. We had meat, not once or twice a month or on festival occasions only, as in our fathers' houses, but every day, with every meal.
Here was our secret. We had found dogs.
Two puppies to be exact, runts of a disowned litter. Arkadian shepherd's hounds we had discovered shivering and suckling-blind, abandoned by their mother, who had untimely given birth in midwinter. We named one Happy and the other Lucky, and they were. By spring both had legs to run, and by summer their instincts had made them hunters. With those dogs our hungry days were over. We could track and kill anything that breathed. We could sleep with both eyes closed and know that nothing could take us unawares. We became such a proficient hunting team, Dio and I and the hounds, that we actually passed up opportunities, came upon game and let it go with the benevolence of gods. We feasted like lords and viewed the sweating valley farmers and plodding highland goatherds with contempt.
Bruxieus began to fear for us. We were growing wild. Cityless. In evenings past, Bruxieus had recited Homer and made it a game how many verses we could repeat without a slip. Now this exercise took on a deadly earnestness for him. He was failing, we all knew it. He would not be with us much longer. Everything he knew, he must pass on.
Homer was our school, the Iliad and Odyssey the texts of our curriculum. Over and over Bruxieus had us recite the verses upon Odysseus' return, when, clad in rags and unrecognizable as the rightly lord of Ithaka, the hero of Troy seeks shelter at the hut of Eumaeus, the swineherd.
Though Eumaeus has no idea that the traveler at his gate is his true king, and thinks him only another cityless beggar, yet out of respect to Zeus, who protects the wayfarer, he invites the wanderer kindly in and shares with him his humble fare.
We must have a city, Bruxieus declared.
Without a city we were no better than the wild brutes we hunted and killed.
Athens,
There, Bruxieus insisted, was where Dio and I must go. The city of Athena was the only truly open city in Hellas, her freest and most civilized. The love of wisdom, philosophia, was esteemed in Athens beyond all other pursuits; the life of the mind was cultivated and honored, invigorated by a high culture of theater, music, poetry, architecture and the arts. Nor were the Athenians inferior to any city in Hellas in the practice of war.
The Athenians welcomed immigrants. A bright strong boy like me could take a trade, indenture himself in a shop. And Athens had a fleet. Even with my crippled hands I could pull an oar. With my skill with the bow I could become a toxotes, a marine archer, distinguish myself in war and exploit that service to advance my position.
Athens, too, was where Diomache must go. As a well-spoken freeborn, and with her blooming beauty, she could find service in a respected house and attract no shortage of admirers. She was at just the right age for a bride; it was far from a stretch to imagine her securing betrothal to a citizen. As the wife even of a metik, a resident alien, she could protect me, aid me in securing employment. And we would have each other.
As Bruxieus' strength diminished with the passing weeks, his conviction intensified that we follow his will in these matters. He made us swear that when his time came, we would go down from the hills and make for Attika, to the city of Athena. In October of that second year Dio and I hunted one long cold-coming day and kilted nothing. We tramped back into camp, grumbling at each other, anticipating a mean porridge of mixed pulse and mountain peas and, worse, the sight of Bruxieus, whose slackening constitution was each day becoming more painful to behold, maintaining that all was well with him; he did not need meat. We saw his smoke and watched the dogs bound up the hill as they loved to, sprinting to their friend to receive his hugs and homecoming roughhouse.
From the trail's turn below the camp we heard their barking. Not the usual squeals of play, but something keener, more insistent, Happy scrambled into view a hundred feet above us. Diomache looked at me and we both knew.
It took an hour to build Bruxieus' pyre. When his gaunt slave-branded body lay at last within the purifying flame, I lit a pitched arrow from the hollow above his heart and loosed it, flaming, with all my strength, arcing like a comet down the dark valley… then aged Nestor, peerless in wisdom among the flowing-haired Achaeans, laid himself down in the fullness of years and closed his eyes as if in sleep, slain by Artemis' gentle darts.
Ten dawns later Diomache and I stood at the Three-Cornered Way, on the frontier of Attika and Megara, where the Athens road breaks off to the east, the Sacred Road to Delphi and the west and the Corinthian southwest, to the Isthmus and the Peloponnese. No doubt we looked like the most savage pair of ragamuffins, barefoot, faces scorched by the sun, our long hair tied in horsetails behind us. Both of us carried daggers and bows, and the dogs loped beside us, as burrcoated and filthy as we were.
Traffic lumbered through the Three Corners, the predawn vehicles, freighters and produce waggons, firewood haulers, farm urchins on their way to market with their cheeses and eggs and sacks of onions, just as Dio and I had started out for Astakos that morning that seemed so long ago and yet was only two winters by the calendar. We halted at the crossroads and asked directions. Yes, a teamster pointed, Athens was that way, two hours, no more.
My cousin and I had barely spoken on the weeklong tramp down from the mountains. We were thinking of cities and what our new life would be like. I watched the other travelers when they passed on the highway, how they eyed her. The need was on her to be a woman. I want babies, she said out of the blue, the last day as we marched. I want a husband to care for and to care for me. I want a home. I don't care how humble, just someplace I can have a little garden, put flowers on the sill and make it pretty for my husband and our children. This was her way of being kind to me, of drawing a distance beforehand, so I would have time to absorb it. Can you understand, Xeo?
I understood. Which dog do you want?
Don't be cross with me. I'm only trying to tell you how things are, and how they must be.
We decided she would take Lucky, and I would keep Happy.
We can stay together in the city, she thought out loud as we walked. We'll tell the people we're brother and sister. But you must understand, Xeo, if I find a decent man, someone who will treat me with respect…
I understand. You can stop talking now.
Two days before, a gentlewoman of Athens had passed us on the highway, traveling by coach with her husband and a merry party of friends and servants. The lady had been taken by the sight of this wild girl, Diomache, and insisted upon having her sewing women bathe and oil her and dress her hair. She wanted to do mine too, but I wouldn't let them near me. Their whole party stopped by a shaded stream and entertained themselves with cakes and wine while the maids took Dio away and groomed her. When my cousin emerged, I didn't recognize her. The Athenian lady was beside herself with delight; she couldn't stop praising Dio's charms, nor anticipating the stir her blossoming beauty would create among the young bloods of the city. The lady insisted that Dio and I proceed straight to her husband's home the moment we arrived in Athens; she would look to our employment and the continuation of our schooling. Her manservant would await us at the Thriasian Gates. Just ask anyone. We tramped on, that last long day. On the freighters that passed now we could read the words Phaleron and Athens scrawled on the destination bands of serried wine jars and crated merchandise. Accents were becoming Attic. We stopped to watch a troop of Athenian cavalry, out on a lark. Four seamen marched past, heading for the city, each balancing his oar upon his shoulder and carrying his strap and cushion- That would be me before long.
Always in rhe hills Dio and I had slept in each other's arms, not as lovers, but for warmth. These final nights on the road, she wrapped herself in her own cloak and took her sleep apart. At last we arrived at dawn before the Three Corners. I had stopped and was watching a freight waggon pass. I could feel my cousin's eyes upon me.
You're not coming, are you?
I said nothing.
She knew which fork I would be taking.
Bruxieus will be angry with you, she said.
Dio and I had learned, from the dogs and on the hunt, how to communicate with just a look. I told her good-bye with my eyes and begged her to understand, She would be well cared for in this city. Her life as a woman was just beginning.
The Spartans will be cruel to you, Diomache said. The dogs paced impatiently at our feet. They did not yet know that they were parting too. Dio took my hands in both of hers. And will we never sleep in each other's arms again, cousin?
It must have seemed a queer spectacle to the teamsters and farm boys passing, the sight of these two wild children embracing upon the roadside, with their slung bows and dag' gers and their cloaks bound into traveler's rolls upon their backs.
Diomache took her road and I took mine. She was fifteen. I was twelve.
How much of this I imparted to Alexandros in those hours in the water, I cannot say. Dawn had still not shown her face when I finished. We were clinging to a miserable floating spar, barely big enough to support one, and too exhausted to swim another stroke. The water was getting colder. Hypothermia gripped our limbs; I heard
Alexandros cough and sputter, struggling for the strength to speak.
We have to quit this spar. If we don't, we'll die.
My eyes strained toward the north. Peaks could be made out, but the shore itself remained invisible. Alexandras' cold hand clasped mine.
Whatever happens, he swore, I will not abandon you.
He let go of the spar. I followed.
An hour later we collapsed like Odysseus on a rock beach beneath a bawling rookery. We gulped fresh water from a cliff-wall spring, washed the salt from our hair and eyes and knelt in thanksgiving for our deliverance. For half the morning we slept like the dead. I climbed for eggs, which we wolfed raw from the shell, standing on the sand in the rags of our garments.
Thank you, my friend, Alexandros said very quietly.
He extended his hand; I took it.
Thank you too.
The sun stood near its zenith; our salt-stiff cloaks had dried upon our backs.
Let's get moving, Alexandros said. We've lost half a day.
Chapter Eleven
The battle took place on a dusty plain to the west of the I city of Antirhion, within bowshot of the beach and immediately beneath the citadel walls. A desultory stream, the Akanathus, meandered across the plain, bisecting it at the midpoint. Perpendicular to this watercourse, along the seaward flank, the Antirhionians had thrown up a crude battle wall. Rugged hills sealed the enemy's left. A portion of the plain adjacent the wall was occupied by a maritime junkyard; rotting craft lay littered at all angles, extending halfway across the field, amid tumbledown work shacks and stinking mounds of debris squalled over by wheeling flocks of gulls. In addition the enemy had strewn boulders and driftwood to break up the flat over which Leonidas and his men must advance. Their own side, the foe's, had been cleared smooth as a schoolmaster's desk.
Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae Page 10
