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

by Steven Pressfield

  Mother of bitches. Dienekes grinned. It's young Purple Balls himself.

  High above the armies, a man of between thirty and forty years could be descried plainly, in robes of purple fringed with gold, mounting the platform and assuming his station upon the throne. The distance was perhaps eight hundred feet, up and back, but even at that range it was impossible to mistake the Persian monarch's surpassing handsomeness and nobility of stature.

  Nor could the supreme self-assurance of his carriage be misread even at this distance. He looked like a man come to watch an entertainment. A pleasantly diverting show, one whose outcome was foreordained and yet which promised a certain level of amusement. He took his seat. A sunshade was adjusted by his servants. We could see a table of refreshments placed at his side and, upon his left, several writing desks set into place, each manned by a secretary.

  Obscene gestures and shouted insults rose from four thousand Greek throats.

  His Majesty rose with aplomb in response to the jeers. He gestured elegantly and, it seemed, with humor, as if acknowledging the adulation of his subjects. He bowed with a flourish. It seemed, though the distance was too great to be sure, as if he were smiling. He saluted his own captains and settled regally upon his throne.

  My place was on the Wall, thirty stations in from the left flank anchored by the mountain. I could see, as could all the Thespians before the Wall and every Lakedaemonian, Mycenaean and Phliasian atop it, the captains of the enemy, advancing now to the sound of their trumpets, in the van before the massed ranks of their infantry. My God, they looked handsome. Six division commanders, each, it seemed, taller and nobler than the next. We learned later that these were not merely the flower of the Median aristocracy, but that their ranks were reinforced by the sons and brothers of those who had been slain ten years earlier by the Greeks at Marathon. But what froze the blood was their demeanor. Their carriage shone forth, bold to the point of contemptuous. They would brush the defenders aside, that's what they thought. The meat of their lunch was already roasting, back down in camp. They would polish us off without raising a sweat, then return to dine at their leisure.

  I glanced to Alexandras; his brow glistened, pale as a winding sheet; his wind came in strangled, wheezing gasps. My master stood at his shoulder, one pace to the fore. Dienekes' attention held riveted to the Medes, whose massed ranks now filled the Narrows and seemed to extend endlessly beyond, out of sight along the track. But no emotion disclari-fied his reason. He was gauging them strategically, coolly assessing their armament and the bearing of their officers, the dress and interval of their ranks. They were mortal men like us; was their vision struck, like ours, with awe of the force which stood now opposed to them? Leonidas had stressed again and again to the officers of the Thespians that their men's shields, greaves and helmets must be bossed to the most brilliant sheen possible. These now shone like mirrors. Above the rims of the bronzefaced aspides, each helmet blazed magnificently, overtopped with a lofty horsehair crest, which as it trembled and quavered in the breeze not only created the impression of daunting height and stature but lent an aspect of dread which cannot be communicated in words but must be beheld to be understood.

  Adding further to the theater of terror presented by the Hellenic phalanx and, to my mind most frightful of all, were the blank, expressionless facings of the Greek helmets, with their bronze nasals thick as a man's thumb, their flaring cheekpieces and the unholy hollows of their eye slits, covering the entire face and projecting to the enemy the sensation that he was facing not creatures of flesh like himself, but some ghastly invulnerable machine, pitiless and unquenchable. I had laughed with Alexandros not two hours earlier as he seated the helmet over his felt undercap; how sweet and boyish he appeared in one instant, with the helmet cocked harmlessly back upon his brow and the youthful, almost feminine features of his face exposed.

  Then with one undramatic motion, his right hand clasped the flare of the cheekpiece and tugged the ghastly mask down; in an instant the humanity of his face vanished, his gentle expressive eyes became unseeable pools of blackness chasmed within the fierce eye sockets of bronze; all compassion fled in an instant from his aspect, replaced with the blank mask of murder. Push it back, I cried. You're scaring the hell out of me. It was no joke.

  This now Dienekes was assessing, the effect of Hellenic armor upon the enemy. My master's eyes scanned the foe's ranks; you could see piss stains darkening the trouser fronts of more than one man. Spear tips shivered here and there. Now the Medes formed up. Each rank found its mark, each commander his station.

  More endless moments passed. Tedium stood displaced by terror. Now the nerves began to scream; the blood pounded within the recesses of the ears. The hands went numb; all sensation fled the limbs. One's body seemed to treble in weight, all of it cold as stone. One heard one's own voice calling upon the gods and could not tell if the sound was in his head or if he was shamefully crying aloud.

  His Majesty's vantage may have been too elevated upon the overstanding mountain to descry what happened next, what stroke of heaven immediately precipitated the clash. It was this. Of a sudden a hare started from the cliffside, dashing out directly between the two armies, no more than thirty feet from the Thespian commander, Xenocratides, who stood foremost in advance of his troops, flanked by his captains, Dithyrambos and Protokreon, all of them garlanded, with their helmets tucked under their arms. At the sight of this wildly sprinting prey, the roan bitch Styx, who had been already barking furiously, loose at the right flank of the Greek formation, now bolted like a shot into the open. The effect would have been comical had not every Hellene's eye seized upon the event at once as a sign from heaven and attended breathlessly upon its outcome.

  The hymn to Artemis, which the troops were singing, faltered in midbreath. The hare fled straight for the Median front-rankers, with Styx hot on its heels and mad with pursuit. Both beasts appeared as screaming blurs, the puffs of dust from their churning feet hanging motionless in the air while their bodies, stretched to the full in the race, streaked on before them. The hare sped straight toward the mass of the Medians, at the approach to which it panicked and tore into a tumble, end over end, as it attempted a right-angle turn at top speed. In a flash Styx was on it; the hound's jaws seemed to snap the prey in two, but, to the astonishment of all, the hare burst free, unscathed, and in an eyeblink had regained full velocity in flight.

  A zigzag chase ensued, in duration fewer than a dozen heartbeats, in which hare and hound traversed thrice the oudenos chorion, the no-man's-land, between the armies. A hare will always flee uphill; its forelegs are shorter than its rear. The speedster sprung now for the mountain wall, attempting to scamper to salvation. But the face was too sheer; the fugitive's feet skidded out from under; it tumbled, fell back. In an instant its form hung limp and broken within the Stygian jaws.

  A cheer rose from the throats of four thousand Greeks, certain that this was an omen of victory, the answer to the hymn it had so serendipitously interrupted. But now from the ranks of the Medes stepped forth two archers. As Styx turned, seeking his master to show off the prize, a pair of cane arrows, launched from no farther than twenty yards and striking simultaneously, slammed into the beast's flank and throat, tumbling him head over heels into the dust.

  A cry of anguish erupted from the Skirite whom all had come to call Hound. For agonizing moments his dog flopped and writhed, pinioned mortally by the enemy's shafts. We heard the enemy commander cry an order in his tongue. At once a thousand Median archers elevated their bows. Here it comes! someone cried from the Wall. Every Hellene's shield was snatched at once to high port. That sound which is not a sound but a silence, a rip like that of fabric torn in the wind, now keened from the fisted grips of the enemy's massed bowmen as their string hands released and their triple-pointed bronzeheads sprung as one into the air, shafts singing, driving them forward.

  While these missiles arced yet through the aether, the Thespian commander, Xenocratides, seized the instant. Ze
us Thunderer and Victory! he cried, tearing the garland from his brow and jerking his helmet down into position of combat, covering, save the eye slits, his entire face. In an instant every man of the Hellenes followed suit. A thousand arrows rained on them in homicidal deluge. The Alpine bellowed. Thespiae!

  From where I stood atop the Wall, it seemed as if the Thespians closed to the foe within the space of two heartbeats. Their front ranks hit the Medes not with that sound of thunder, bronze upon bronze, which the Hellenes knew from collisions with their own kind, but with a less dramatic, almost sickening crunch, like ten thousand fistfuls of kindling stalks snapped in the vineyardman's fists, as the metallic facings of the Greeks' shields collided with the wall of wicker thrown up by the Medes. The enemy reeled and staggered. The Thespians' spears rose and plunged. In an instant the killing zone was obscured within a maelstrom of churning dust.

  The Spartans atop the wall held motionless as that peculiar bellowslike compression of ranks unfolded before their sight; the first three ranks of the Thespians compacted against the foe and churned like a movable wall upon them; now the succeeding ranks, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and more, between whom an interval had opened in the rush, caught up, wave succeeding wave and compressing one upon the other, as each man elevated his shield to high port and planted it as squarely as his terror-unstrung limbs would permit into the back of the comrade before him, seating his left shoulder beneath the upper rim, and, digging his soles and toes into the earth for purchase, hurled himself with all his force into the melee. The heart stopped with the awe of it, as each warrior of the Thespians cried out to his gods, to the souls of his children, to his mother, to every entity, noble or absurd, which he could imagine of aid, and, forgetting his own life, waded with impossible courage into the mob of murder.

  What had been a moment earlier a formation of troops, discernible as ranks and files, even as individuals, transformed in the space of a heartbeat into a roiling mass of manslaughter. The Thespian reserves could not contain themselves; they, too, hurled themselves forward, pressing the weight of their ranks into the backs of their brothers, heaving against the compacted mass of the enemy.

  Behind these the Thespians' squires danced like ants on a skillet, unranked and unarmored, some backpedaling in terror, others dashing forward, crying out to each other to remember their courage and not fail the men they served. Toward these servants of the train now sailed a second and third rainbow of arrows, loosed by the massed enemy archers stationed to the rear of their lancers and fired in arching fusillades directly over their comrades' plumed heads. The bronzeheads struck the earth in a ragged but discernible front, like a squall line at sea. One could see this curtain of death withdraw rearward as the Median archers fell back behind their lancers, maintaining an interval so they could concentrate their fire upon the mass of the Greeks assaulting them and not squander it, lobbing shafts over their heads. One Thespian squire dashed recklessly forward to the squall line. A bronzehead nailed him right through the foot. He cavorted off, howling in pain and cursing himself for an idiot.

  Forward to Lion Stone!

  With a cry, Leonidas dismounted his post atop the Wall and advanced down the stone slope, which had been erected deliberately with a descendible incline, into the open before the Spartans, Mycenaeans and Phliasians. These now followed, as the beaten zone of the enemy's bronzeheads retreated under the furious push of the Thespians, maintaining the dress of their lines, as they had rehearsed half a hundred times in the preceding four days, forming up in ready position on the level ground before the Wall.

  Along the mountain face to the left, three stones, each at twice the height of a man so they could be seen above the dust of battle, had been selected as benchmarks.

  Lizard Stone, so named for a particularly fearless fellow of that species who took his sun thereupon, stood farthest forward of the Phokian Wall, closest to the Narrows, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet from the actual mouth of the pass. This was the line to which the enemy would be permitted to advance. It had been determined by trial with our own men that a thousand of the foe, densely packed, could fit between this demarcation and the Narrows. A thousand, Leonidas had ordered, will be invited to the dance. There, at Lizard Stone, they will be engaged and their advance checked.

  Crown Stone, second of the three and another hundred feet rearward of Lizard, defined the line at which each relief detachment would marshal, immediately before being hurled into the fray.

  Lion Stone, rearmost of the three and directly in front of the Wall, marked the waiting line-the runners' chute, at which each relief unit would marshal, leaving enough space between itself and those actually fighting for the rear ranks of the combatants to maneuver, to give ground if necessary, to rally, for one flank to support another and for the wounded to be withdrawn. Along this demarcation the Spartans, Mycenaeans and Phliasians now took their stations. Dress the line! the polemarch Olympieus bellowed. Close up your interval! He prowled before the front, disdaining the drizzle of arrows, shouting to his platoon commanders, who relayed the orders to their men.

  Leonidas, out farther still before Olympieus, surveyed the roiling, dust-choked struggle ahead at the Narrows. The sound, if anything, had increased. The clash of sword and spear upon shield, the ringing bell-like toll of the bowl-shaped bronze, the cries of the men, the sharp cracking explosions as lances shivered under impact and snapped in two; all echoed and reverberated between the mountain face and the Narrows like some theatron of death circumvallated within its own stone amphitheater. Leonidas, still garlanded, with his helmet up, turned and signaled to the polemarch. Shields to rest! Olympieus' voice boomed. Along the Spartan line, aspides were lowered and set upright upon the earth, top rims balanced against each man's thigh, with the shield's forearm sheath and gripcord ready to hand. All helmets were up, each man's face still exposed. Beside Dienekes, his captain-of-eight, Bias, was hopping like a flea. This is it, this is it, this is it.

  Steady, gentlemen. Dienekes stepped forward to let his men see him. Rest those cheeseplates. In the third rank Ariston, beside himself with agitation, yet clutched his shield at port. Dienekes reached through and whacked him with the flat of his lizard-sticker. Are you showing off? The youth snapped to, blinking like a boy awoken from a nightmare. For a full heartbeat you could see he had no idea who Dienekes was or what he wanted. Then, with a start and a sheepish expression, he recovered himself and lowered his shield to position of rest against his knee.

  Dienekes prowled before the men. All eyes on me! Here, brothers! His voice penetrated, hard and throaty, carrying with the hoarse bark all combatants know when their tongue turns to leather. Look at me, don't look at the fighting!

  The men tore their eyes from the flood and ebb of murder which was taking place a stone's lob in front of them. Dienekes stood before them, his back to the enemy. This is what's happening, a blind man could tell just from the sound. Dienekes' voice carried despite the din from the Narrows. The enemy's shields are too small and too light. They can't protect themselves. The Thespians are carving them up. The men's glances kept tearing away toward the struggle. Look at me! Put your lamps here, goddamn you! The enemy hasn't broken yet. They feel their King's eyes upon them. They're falling like wheat but their courage hasn't failed. I said, look at me! In the killing zone, you see our allies' helmets now, rising out of the slaughter; it seems as if the Thespians are mounting a wall. They are. A wall of Persian bodies.

  This was true. Distinctly could be beheld a rise of men, a wave of its own within the boiling melee. The Thespians will only last a few more minutes. They're exhausted from killing. It's a grouse shoot. Fish in a net. Listen to me! When our turn comes, the enemy will be ready to cave.

  I can hear him cracking now. Remember: we're going in for a boxer's round. In and out. Nobody dies. No heroes. Get in, kill all you can, then get out when the trumpets sound.

  Behind the Spartans, on the Wall, which had been filled with the third wave of Tegeates and Opoun
tian Lokrians twelve hundred strong, the wail of the Alpine cut the din. Out front, Leonidas raised his spear and tugged his helmet down. You could see Polynikes and the Knights advance to envelop him. The Thespians' round was over. Hats down! Dienekes bellowed. Cheeseplates up!

  The Spartans came in frontally, eight deep, at a double interval, allowing the Thespian rearmen to withdraw between their files, man by man, one rank at a time. There was no order to it; the Thespians just dropped from exhaustion; the Lakedaemonian tread rolled over them. When the Spartan promachoi, the forerankers, got within three shields of the front, their spears began plunging at the foe over the allies' shoulders. Many of the Thespians just dropped and let themselves be trampled; their mates pulled them to their feet once the line had passed over them.

  Everything Dienekes had said proved true. The Medes' shields were not only too light and too small, but their lack of mass prevented them from gaining purchase against the Hellenes' wide and weighty, bowl-shaped aspides. The enemy's targeteer shields slid off the convex fronts of the Greeks', deflecting up and down, left and right, exposing their bearers' necks and thighs, throats and groins. The Spartans struck overhand with their spears, again and again into the faces and gorges of the enemy. The Medes' armament was that of skirmishers, of lightly armed warriors of the plains, whose role was to strike swiftly, from beyond range of spear thrust, dealing death at a distance. This dense-packed phalanx warfare was hell on them.

  And yet they stood. Their valor was breathtaking, beyond reckless to the point of madness. It became sacrifice, pure and simple; the Medes gave up their bodies as if flesh itself were a weapon. In minutes the Spartans, and no doubt the Mycenaeans and Phliasians as well, though I couldn't see them, were beyond exhaustion. Simply from killing. Simply from the arm's thrust of the spear, the shoulder's heave of the shield, the thunder of blood through the veins and the hammering of the heart within the breast. The earth grew, not Uttered with enemy bodies, but piled with them. Stacked with them. Mounded with them.