Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck.
A secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercises, is the face, specifically the muscles of the jaw, the neck and the four ocular constrictors around the eye sockets. These nexuses are termed by the Spartans phobosynakteres, fear accumulators.
Fear spawns in the body, phobologic science teaches, and must be combated there. For once the flesh is seized, a phobokyklos, or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itself, mounting into a runaway of terror. Put the body into a state of aphobia, fearlessness, the Spartans believe, and the mind will follow.
Under the oaks, in the still half-light before dawn, Dienekes practiced alone with Alexandras. He would tap the boy with an olive bough, very lightly, on the side of the face. Involuntarily the muscles of the trapezius would contract. Feel the fear? There. Feel it? The older man's voice crooned soothingly, like a trainer gentling a colt. Now. Drop your shoulder. He popped the boy's cheek again. Let the fear bleed out. Feel it?
Man and boy worked for hours on the owl muscles, the ophthalmomyes surrounding the eyes.
These, Dienekes instructed Alexandras, were in many ways the most powerful of all, for God in His wisdom made mortals' keenest defensive reflex that which protects the vision. Watch my face when the muscles constrict, Dienekes demonstrated. What expression is this? Phobos.
Fear.
Dienekes, schooled in the discipline, commanded his facial muscles to relent.
Now. What does this expression indicate? Aphobia. Fearlessness.
It seemed effortless when Dienekes did it, and the other boys in their training were practicing and mastering this too. But for Alexandras, nothing of the discipline came easy. The only time his heart beat truly without fear was when he mounted the choral stand and stood, solitary, to sing at the Gymnopaedia and the other boys' festivals.
Perhaps his true guardians were the Muses. Dienekes had Alexandras sacrifice to them and to Zeus and Mnemosyne. Agathe, one of the two-looker sisters of Ariston, made a charm of amber to Polyhymnia, and Alexandras carried it with him, pended from the Crosshatch within his shield.
Dienekes encouraged Alexandros in his singing. The gods endow each man with a gift by which he may conquer fear; Alexandros', Dienekes felt certain, was his voice. Skill in singing in Sparta is counted second only to martial valor and in fact is closely related, through the heart and lungs, within the discipline of the phobologia. This is why the Lakedaemonians sing as they advance into battle. They are schooled to open the throat and gulp the air, work the lungs till the accumulators relent and break the constriction of fear.
There are two running courses within the city: the Little Ring, which begins at the Gymnasion and follows the Ko-nooura road beneath Athena of the Brazen House, and the Big Ring, which laps all five villages, past Amyklai, along the Hyakinthian Way and across the slopes of Taygetos. Alexandros ran the big one, six miles barefoot, before sacrifice and after dinner mess.
Extra rations were slipped him by the helot cooks. By unspoken compact the boys of his boua protected him in training. They covered for him when his lungs betrayed him, when it seemed he might be singled out for punishment. Alexandros responded with a secret shame which propelled him to even greater exertions.
He began to train in the all-in, that type of no-holds-barred boys' brawling unique to Lakedaemon, in which the competitor may kick, bite, gouge the eyes, do anything but raise the hand for quarter. Alexandros hurled himself barefoot up the Therai watercourse and bare-handed against the pankratist's bag; he ran weighted sprints, he pounded his fists into the trainer's boxes of sand. His slender hands became scarred and knuckle-busted. His nose broke again and again.
He fought boys from his own platoon and others, and he fought me.
I was growing fast. My hands were getting stronger. Every athletic action Alexandros performed, I could do better. In the fighting square it was all I could do not to break up his face even more.
He should have hated me, but it was not in him. He shared his surplus rations and worried that I would be whipped for going easy on him.
We talked for hours in secret on the pursuit of esoterike harmonia, that state of self-composure which the exercises of the phobologia are designed to produce- As a string of the kithera vibrates purely, emitting only that note of the musical scale which is its alone, so must the individual warrior shed all which is superfluous in his spirit, until he himself vibrates at that sole pitch which his individual daimon dictates. The achievement of this ideal, in Lakedaemon, carries beyond courage on the battlefield; it is considered the supreme embodiment of virtue, andreia, of a citizen and a man.
Beyond esoterike harmonia lies exoterike harmonia, that state of union with one's fellows which parallels the musical harmony of the multistringed instrument or of the chorus of voices itself. In battle exoterike harmonia guides the phalanx to move and strike as one man, of a single mind and will. In passion it unites husband to wife, lover to lover, in wordless perfect union. In politics exoterike harmonia produces a city of concord and unity, in which each individual, securing his own noblest expression of character, donates this to each other, as obedient to the laws of the commonwealth as the strings of the kithera to the immutable mathematics of music. In piety exoterike harmonia produces that silent symphony which most delights the ears of the gods.
At the height of that summer there was a war with the Antirhionians. Four of the army's twelve lochoi were mobilized (reinforced by elements of the Skiritai, the mountain rangers who comprised their own main-force regiment) to a call-up of the first ten age-classes, twenty-eight hundred in all. This was no force to be taken lightly, all-Lakedaemonian, commanded by the king himself; the battle train alone would be half a mile long. It would be the first full-scale campaign since the death of Kleomenes and the third in which Leoni-das would assume command as king, Polynikes would go as a Knight of the king's bodyguard, Olympieus with the Huntress battalion in the Wild Olive lochos and Dienekes as a platoon commander, an enomotarch, in the Herakles.
Even Dekton, my half-breed friend, would be mobilized as herd boy for the sacrificial beasts.
The entire Deukalion mess in which Alexandros stood-to, meaning acted as occasional cupbearer and server so he could observe his elders and learn, was called up except the five eldest men, between forty and sixty. For Alexandros, though he was six years too young to go, the mobilization seemed to plunge him even more deeply under his cloud. The uncalled-up Peers twitched about with their own brand of frustration. The air was touchy and ripe for explosiveness.
Somehow an all-in match got started one evening between Alexandros and me, outdoors behind the mess. The Peers gathered eagerly; the action was just what they needed. I could hear Dienekes' voice, cheering the brawl on. Alexandros seemed full of fire; we were bare-handed and his smallish fists flew fast as darts. He kicked me hard, to the temple, and followed with a solid elbow to the gut; I dropped. It was a true fall, I was really hurt, but the Peers had seen Alexandras' friends cover for him so frequently that they now thought I was tanking it.
Alexandros did too.
Get up, you outlander piece of shit! He straddled me in the dirt and hit me again when I rose.
For the first time I heard real killer instinct in his voice. The Peers heard it too and raised a shout of delight. Meanwhile the hounds, of whom there were never fewer than twenty after chow time, howled and bounded from every quarter in the turf-skimming fever that their masters' excited voices now drove them to.