The seventh day had come and gone now, and the army had reached that stage of exhaustion and short-temperedness that the eight-nighter was contrived to produce. It was late afternoon; the men were just rousing themselves from some pitifully inadequate catnap, parched and filthy and stink-begrimed, in anticipation of the final night's drill. Everyone was hungry and tired and drained utterly of fluid. A hundred variations were spun out on the same joke, each man's wish for a real war so he could finally get more than a half hour's snooze and a bellyful of hot chow.
The men were dressing their long sweat-matted hair, griping and bitching, while their squires and helots, as miserable and dehydrated as they, handed them the last dry fig cake, without wine or water, and readied them for the sunset sacrifice, while their stacked arms and panoplia waited in perfect order for the night's work to begin.
Alexandras' training platoon was already awake and in formation, with eight others of the fourth age-class, boys thirteen and fourteen under their twenty-year-old drill instructors, on the lower slopes below the army's camp. These agoge platoons were regularly exposed to the sight of their elders and the rigors they endured, as a means of rousing their emulative instincts to even greater levels of exertion. I had been dispatched to the upper camp with a message stick when the commotion came from back down across the plain.
I turned and saw Alexandros singled out at the edge of his platoon, with Polynikes, the Knight and Olympic champion, standing before him, raging. Alexandros was fourteen, Polynikes twenty-three; even at a range of a hundred yards you could see the boy was terrified.
This warrior Polynikes was no man to be trifled with. He was a nephew of Leonidas, with a prize of valor already to his name, and utterly pitiless. Apparently he had come down from the upper camp on some errand, had passed the boys of the agoge in their lineup and spotted some breach of discipline.
Now the Peers on the slope above could see what it was, Alexandros had neglected his shield, or to use the Doric term, etimasen, defamed it. Somehow he had allowed it to lie outside his grasp, facedown, untended on the ground with its big concave bowl pointing at the sky.
Polynikes stood in front of him. What is this I see in the dirt before me? he roared. The Spartiates uphill could hear every syllable.
It must be a chamber pot, with its bowl peeking up so daintily.
Is it a chamber pot? he demanded of Alexandros. The boy answered no.
Then what is it?
It is a shield, lord.
Polynikes declared this impossible.
It can't be a shield, I'm certain of that. His voice carried powerfully up the amphitheater of the valley. Because not even the dumbest bum-fucked shitworm of a paidarion would leave a shield lying facedown where he couldn't snatch it up in an instant when the enemy came upon him. He towered above the mortified boy.
It is a chamber pot, Polynikes declared. Fill it.
The torture began.
Alexandras was ordered to piss into his shield. It was a training shield, yes. But Dienekes knew as he looked down with the other Peers from the slope above that this particular aspis, patched and repatched over decades, had belonged to Alexandras' father and grandfather before him.
Alexandras was so scared and so dehydrated, he couldn't raise a drop.
Now a second factor entered the equation. This was the tendency among the youths in training, those who were not for the moment the object of their superiors' rage, to convulse with perverse glee at the misery of whatever luckless mate now found himself spitted above the coals. Up and down the line of boys, teeth sank into tongues seeking to suppress this fear-inspired hilarity. One lad named Ariston, who was extremely handsome and the fastest sprinter of the fourth class, something of a younger version of Polynikes himself, could not contain himself. A snort escaped his clamped jaws.
Polynikes turned upon him in fury. Ariston had three sisters, all what the Lakedaemonians call two-lookers, meaning they were so pretty that one look was not enough, you had to look twice to appreciate them.
Polynikes asked Ariston if he thought this was funny.
No, lord, the boy replied.
If you think this is funny, wait till you get into combat. You'll think that's hysterical.
No, lord.
Oh yes you will. You'll be giggling like your goddam sisters. He advanced a pace nearer. Is that what you think war is, you fucking come-spot?
No, lord.
Polynikes pressed his face inches from the boy's, glowering into his eyes with a look of blistering malice. Tell me. Which do you think will be the bigger laugh: when you take an enemy spear eighteen inches up the dogblossom, or when your psalm-singing mate Alexandras takes one?
Neither, lord. Ariston's face was stone.
You're afraid of me, aren't you? That's the real reason you're laughing. You're so fucking happy it wasn't you I singled out.
No, lord.
What? You're not afraid of me?
Polynikes demanded to know which it was. Because if Ariston was afraid of him, then he was a coward. And if he wasn't, he was reckless and ignorant, which was even worse.
Which is it, you miserable mound of shit? 'Cause you'd better fucking well be afraid of me. I'll put my dick in your right ear, pull it out your left and fill that chamber pot myself.
Polynikes ordered the other boys to take up Alexandras' slack. While their pathetic dribbles of urine splotched onto the wood and leather-padded frame, over the good-luck talismans that Alexandras' mother and sisters had made and that hung from the inner frame, Polynikes returned his attention to Alexandras, querying him on the protocol of the shield, which the boy knew and had known since he was three.
The shield must stand upright at all times, Alexandras declaimed at the top of his voice, with its forearm sleeve and handgrip at the ready. If a warrior stand at the rest, his shield must lean against his knees. If he sit or lie, it must be supported upright by the tripous basis, a light threelegged stand which all bore inside the bowl of the concave hoplon, in a carrying nest made for that purpose.
The other youths under Polynikes' orders had now finished urinating as best they could into the hollow of Alexandras' shield. I glanced at Dienekes. His features betrayed no emotion, though I knew he loved Alexandras and wished for nothing more than to dash down the slope and murder Polynikes.
But Polynikes was right. Alexandros was wrong. The boy must be taught a lesson.
Polynikes now had Alexandros' tripous basis in his hand. The little tripod was comprised of three dowels joined at one end by a leather thong. The dowels were the thickness of a man's finger and about eighteen inches long. Line of battle! Polynikes bellowed. The platoon of boys formed up.
He had them all lay their shields, defamed, facedown in the dirt, exactly as Alexandros had done.
By now twelve hundred Spartiates up the hill were observing the spectacle, along with an equal number of squires and helot attendants.
Shields, port!
The boys lunged for their heavy, grounded hopla. As they did, Polynikes lashed at Alexandras' face with the tripod. Blood sprung. He swatted the next boy and the next until the fifth at last wrestled his twenty-pound, unwieldy shield off the ground and up into place to defend himself.
He made them do it again and again and again.
Starting at one end of the line, then the other, then the middle. Polynikes, as I have said, was an Agiad, one of the Three Hundred Knights and an Olympic victor besides. He could do anything he liked. The drill instructor, who was just an eirene, had been brushed aside, and could do nothing but look on in mortification.
This is hilarious, isn't it? Polynikes demanded of the boys. I'm beside myself, aren't you? I can hardly wait to see combat, which will be even more fun.
The youths knew what was coming next.