“You heard me,” Xerxes restrained himself from ordering his master-at-arms from lopping off the general’s head for questioning the order.
The general bowed his head. “Yes, my lord.” He scurried off to pass the command down the chain of command.
Leonidas had watched the general scurry away and wondered what was next. It was obvious the Persian King was losing patience with the barrage. From the lack of shadows from the arrows sticking into the ground nearby, Leonidas estimated it was noon. This had gone on without change for longer than he had hoped.
He was thirsty and his bladder was full. Several men had already pissed where they knelt, the urine flowing in small golden rivulets along the rocky ground. And no one said a word about it. What was a little piss when arrows were raining down upon them and a quarter million men waited to slay them?
Leonidas could see the Scythian commander talking to a courier who wore a helmet with a tall plume on it — the same officer that Xerxes had been screaming at.
“Steady, men,” Leonidas yelled. “Something’s getting ready to happen.”
“About damn time,” someone yelled in response, which brought a chorus of laughter.
The Scythian commander was yelling orders in his strange tongue, his men lifting their shields. Still the arrows came. The commander went down his line, making sure it was dressed properly, shields interlocked, spears forward.
Leonidas frowned as another arrow thunked into his shield. The Scythian lines began moving forward, yet the barrage wasn’t stopping. If anything, Leonidas realized, it was getting thicker. He suddenly realized what was about to happen. He looked through the thin space between his shield and the man to his right toward Xerxes. The Persian King was leaning forward, as if watching some interesting sporting event.
The Scythian commander pointed forward toward the Spartans with his sword. Leonidas could see the fear on the men’s faces. He could hear muttering in his own ranks as his men realized the enemy infantry was approaching; yet the arrows still came down.
The Scythians were halfway across the open space. Some arrows, their range short, began to fall into their ranks. Leonidas saw one of the warriors in the front rank collapse to his knees and fall forward, a shaft sticking up out of his back.
When the Scythians were less than twenty meters from his men, Leonidas rose to his feet, bringing his shield from the up to forward position. His heart pounded with pride as the entire two lines of Spartans immediately rose and did the same, ignoring the arrows that showered down upon them.
The Scythians slammed into his lines, both sides jabbing, hacking and slashing as they fought among the arrows still being fired by the Persian archers. The missiles struck without regard for the side one was on.
Leonidas neatly sliced the head off of a Scythian right in front of him, then pointed the Naga Staff blade up into the air and pumped up and down three times, before bringing it down to parry a thrust from a Scythian officer.
Hidden in the bushes above the pass, a skiritai saw the signal and passed it along. Over two hundred squires and skiritai were hidden on the slope, crouched under bushes and behind piles of rock, clinging to the steep slope in small hollows they had dug the night before.
Released, they sprang into action, shoving forward stones that had been laboriously carried up the slope from the Middle Gate the previous evening. The heavy rocks tumbled down, smashing into the clusters of archers below.
The squires and skiritai were too high as the archers tried to turn their weapons against them. The arrows reached their apex fifty feet below, then many arched over and caused their own mayhem among those that had loosed them.
And at that moment, Lichas and his archers arrived. They announced that by a line of men stepping up onto the Middle Gate and firing point blank into the Scythians, just over the heads of the Spartans. At such close range their powerful bows could punch through armor and the effect was devastating.
The arrows from the Persians had stopped as the archers reacted and died under the rock assault from above, which was becoming a literal avalanche as the hundreds of head sized rocks that had once been half of the Middle Gate that had been carried by the Spartans up the slope the previous night showered down upon them.
The front rank of Scythians were fighting bravely even as the ranks behind them were spitted by the Greek arrows. Leonidas moved forward and the Spartan line surged, the men actually happy to be free to move, even if it were toward the enemy, after so many hours under their shields. Their heavy sandals snapped the arrows stuck in the ground as they slashed at the Scythians.
Leonidas howled with the passion of combat as he drove the Naga Staff completely through the chest of a warrior in front of him, the thrust so strong it actually struck the man behind that Scythian, killing him also. The entire Spartan line growled, screamed and yelled as they cut into the Scythians with a vengeance their enemy had never seen and would not see again as they died.
Absolute silence reigned on the hillside around Xerxes throne. Not a single Scythian escaped. Half the archers were dead, crushed by stone or knocked off the trail to fall to their death below. The others were fleeing down the same path taken by the Egyptian and Immortal survivors of the past two days.
Xerxes pulled his dagger out and stalked forward. His master of arms was at the edge of the escarpment. Xerxes slammed the blade into the man’s chest and he tumbled forward. The Persian King spun about. No one would meet his eyes. Except Pandora.
“Go.” Xerxes gestured with the blood-stained dagger. “Check the path. Be back by daylight.”
“Stop.”
Leonidas whirled, Naga Staff at the ready and only managed to halt the sharp blade as it reached Cyra’s neck.
“Stop,” she repeated, placing her hand on his arm. “It is done for today. It is done.”
Leonidas blinked.
“It is done. You have won.”
Leonidas slowly nodded. “For today,” he whispered, looking at the blood on the blade of the Naga Staff.
“For today,” Cyra acknowledged.
“And tomorrow?” Leonidas looked around in a daze at the dead and dying that surrounded him, lying in a field of countless arrows. His feet were submerged several inches deep into the mud made of dirt, blood and urine.
“Ah,” Leonidas moaned. He staggered several feet to the right and sunk to his knees, ignoring the muck as he dropped the Naga Staff and cradled the head of a wounded man in his arms. Cyra joined and recognized Polynices.
“You led well,” the old man whispered, blood flecking his beard.
Leonidas was looking about. “We have lost many.”
“But as long as there is one Spartan standing-” Polynices paused to take a deep breath, before continuing—“the Persians will not have the pass.”
“You fought bravely,” Leonidas said. “I saw—” he stopped when he noted that the blood was no longer bubbling out of the old man’s mouth. He reached up and closed the lifeless eyes. “He was my first instructor in the agoge. He was the first to teach me the basics of phobologia.”
Cyra placed her arm across the King’s shoulders. “Perhaps — just perhaps — fear is a good thing. Perhaps there are things we should fear. Things we don’t understand.”
Leonidas shook her arm off. “Can you respect the dead?”
Cyra stood. “We are doing this to respect the living.”