His mother straightened before him.
Go, then, the lady Paraleia addressed her son at last. She didn't need to add that I would go with him. And may God preserve you in the lashing you receive when you return.
Chapter Ten
It was not hard to follow the army. The track along the Oenous was churned to dust, ankle-deep.
At Selassia the perioikic Stephanos regiment had joined the expedition. Alexandros and I, arriving in the dark, could still make out the trodden-bare marshaling ground and the freshly dried blood upon the altar where the sacrifices had been performed and the omens taken. The army itself was half a day ahead; we could not stop for sleep, but pushed on all night.
At dawn we came upon men we recognized. A helot armorer named Eukrates had broken his leg in a fall and was being helped home by two of his fellows. He informed us that at the frontier fort of Oion fresh intelligence had reached Leonidas. The Antirhionians, far from rolling over and playing dead as the king had hoped, had sent envoys in secret, appealing for aid to the tyrannos Gelon in Sikelia. Gelon could appreciate as well as Leonidas and the Persians the strategic indispensability of the port of Antirhion; he wanted it too. Forty Syrakusan ships bearing two thousand citizen and mercenary heavy infantry were on their way to reinforce the Antirhionian defenders. It would be a real battle after all.
The Spartan force pressed on through Tegea. The Tegeates, member allies of the Peloponnesian League and obligated to follow the Spartans whithersoever they should lead, reinforced the army with six hundred of their own heavy infantry, swelling its fighting total to beyond four thousand. Leonidas had not been seeking parataxis, a pitched battle, with the Antirhionians.
Rather he had hoped to overawe them with a show of such force that they would perceive the folly of defiance and enroll themselves of their own free will in the alliance against the Persians.
Among Dekton's herd was a wrapped bull, brought in anticipation of celebration, of festive sacrifice in honor of this new addition to the League. But the Antirhionians, perhaps bought by Gelon's gold, inflamed by the rhetoric of some glory-hungry demagogue or betrayed by a lying oracle, had chosen to make a fight of it.
When Alexandros spoke to the helots on the road, he had queried them for intelligence on the specific makeup of the Syrakusan forces: which units, under which commanders, reinforced by which auxiliaries. The helots didn't know. In any army other than the Spartan, such ignorance would have provoked a fierce tongue-lashing or worse. Yet Alexandros let it go without a thought.
Among the Lakedaemonians, it is considered a matter of indifference of whom and in what the enemy consists.
The Spartans are schooled to regard the foe, any foe, as nameless and faceless. In their minds it is the mark of an ill-prepared and amateur army to rely in the moments before battle on what they call pseudoandreia, false courage, meaning the artificially inflated martial frenzy produced by a general's eleventh-hour harangue or some peak of bronze-banging bravado built to by shouting, shield-pounding and the like. In Alexandros' mind, which already at age fourteen mirrored that of the generals of his city, one Syrakusan was as good as the next, one enemy strategos no different from another. Let the foe be Mantinean, Olynthian, Epidaurian; let him come in elite units or hordes of shrieking rabble, crack citizen regiments or foreign mercenaries hired for gold. It made no difference. None was a match for the warriors of Lakedaemon, and all knew it.
Among the Spartans the work of war is demystified and depersonalized through its vocabulary, which is studded with references both agrarian and obscene. Their word which I translated earlier as fuck, as in the youths' tree-fucking, bears the connotation not so much of penetration as of grinding, like a miller's stone. The front three ranks fuck or mill the enemy. The verb to kill, in Doric theros, is the same as to harvest. The warriors in the fourth through sixth ranks are sometimes called harvesters, both for the work they do on the trampled enemy with the butt-spike lizard-stickers of their eight-footers and for that pitiless threshing stroke they make with the short xiphos sword, which itself is often called a reaper. To decapitate a man is to top him off or give him a haircut. Chopping off a hand or arm is called limbing.
Alexandros and I arrived at Rhion, at the bluff overlooking the army's embarkation port, a little after midnight of the third day. The port lights of Antirhion shone, clearly visible across the narrow strait. The embarkation beaches were already packed with men and boys, women and children, a thronging festive mob gathered to watch the spectacle of the fleet of galleys and coasters, conscripted merchantmen, ferries and even fishing boats assembled in advance by the allied Rhionians to transport the army in darkness west along the coast, out of sight of Antirhion, then across the gulf where it stood widest, some five miles down. Leonidas, respecting the seafighting reputation of the Antirhionians, had elected to make this passage at night.
Among the blufftop farewell-bawlers Alexandros and I located a boy our age whose father, he claimed, owned a fast smack and would not be averse to pocketing the wad of Attic drachmas clutched in AlexandrosI fist in exchange for a swift silent crossing, no questions asked. The boy led us down through the crush of spectators and merrymakers to an obscure launching beach called the Ovens, behind an unlighted breakwater. Not twenty minutes after the last Spartan transport had cast off, we were on the water too, trailing the fleet out of sight to the west.
I fear the sea anytime, but never more than on a moonless night and in the hands of strangers.
Our captain had insisted on bringing along his two brothers, though a man and a boy could easily handle the light swift craft. I have known these coasters and man jacks and mistrust them; the brothers, if indeed that's what they were, were hulking louts barely capable of speech, with beards so dense they began just below the eyeline and extended thick as fur to the matted pelts of their chests.
An hour passed. The smack was making far too much speed; across the dark water the plash of the transports' oar-blades and even the creaking of looms against tholepins carried easily.
Alexandros ordered the pirate twice to retard his progress, but the man tossed it off with a laugh.
We were downwind, he said, no one could hear us, and even if they did they would take us for part of the convoy, or one of the spectator boats, trailing to catch the action.
Sure enough, as soon as the belly of the coastline had swallowed the lights of Rhion behind us, a Spartan cutter emerged out of the black and made way to intercept us. Doric voices hailed the smack and ordered her to heave-to. Suddenly our skipper demanded his money. When we land, Alexandros insisted, as agreed. The beards clamped oars in their fists like weapons. Cutter's getting closer, boys. How will it go with you if you're caught?
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.