Thank you, my friend, Alexandros said very quietly.
He extended his hand; I took it.
Thank you too.
The sun stood near its zenith; our salt-stiff cloaks had dried upon our backs.
Let's get moving, Alexandros said. We've lost half a day.
Chapter Eleven
The battle took place on a dusty plain to the west of the I city of Antirhion, within bowshot of the beach and immediately beneath the citadel walls. A desultory stream, the Akanathus, meandered across the plain, bisecting it at the midpoint. Perpendicular to this watercourse, along the seaward flank, the Antirhionians had thrown up a crude battle wall. Rugged hills sealed the enemy's left. A portion of the plain adjacent the wall was occupied by a maritime junkyard; rotting craft lay littered at all angles, extending halfway across the field, amid tumbledown work shacks and stinking mounds of debris squalled over by wheeling flocks of gulls. In addition the enemy had strewn boulders and driftwood to break up the flat over which Leonidas and his men must advance. Their own side, the foe's, had been cleared smooth as a schoolmaster's desk.
When Alexandros and I scurried breathless and tardy upon the site, the Spartan Skiritai rangers had just finished setting the enemy refuse yards ablaze. The armies yet stood in formation, twofifths of a mile apart, with the burning hulks between them. All native merchantmen and fishing craft had been withdrawn by the enemy, either hauled to safety within the fortified portion of the anchorage or standing offshore beyond the invaders' reach. This did not deter the Skiritai from torching the wharves and warehouses of the harbor.
The timbers of the ship sheds the rangers had saturated with naphtha; already they blazed in ruins to the waterline. The defenders of Antirhion, as Leonidas and the Spartans well knew, were militiamen, farmers and potters and fishermen, summertime soldiers like my father. The devastation of their harbor was meant to unnerve them, to dislocate their faculties unaccustomed to such sights and sear into their unseasoned senses the stink and scourge of coming slaughter. It was morning, about market time, and the shore breeze had gotten up. Black smoke from the careened wrecks began to obscure the field; the pitch and encaustic of their timbers blazed with fury, abetted by the wind, which turned the debris-pile smudge bums into howling bonfires.
Alexandros and I had secured a vantage along the landward bluff, no more than a furlong above the site where the massed formations must clash. The smoke was already gagging us. We made our way across the slope. Others had claimed the site before us, boys and older men of Antirhion, armed with bows, slings and missile weapons they meant to hurl down upon the Spartans as they advanced, but these light-armed forces had been cleared early by the Skiritai, whose comrades below would advance as always from their position of honor on the Lakedaemonian left. The rangers took possession of half the face, driving the enemy skirmishers back where their slings and shafts were outranged and could work no harm to the army.
Directly beneath us, an eighth of a mile away, the Spartans and their allies were marshaling into their ranks. Squires armed the warriors from the feet up, starting with the heavy oxhide soles which could tread over fire; then the bronze greaves, which the squires bent into place around the shins of their masters, securing them at the rear of the calf by the flex of the metal alone. We could see Alexandras' father, Olympieus, and the white beard of his squire, Mer-iones.
The troops bound their private parts next, accompanied by obscene humor as each warrior mocksolemnly saluted his manhood and offered a prayer that he and it would still be acquainted when the day was over.
This process of arming for battle, which the citizen-soldiers of other poleis had practiced no more than a dozen times a year in the spring and summer training, the Spartans had rehearsed and rerehearsed, two hundred, four hundred, six hundred times each campaigning season. Men in their fifties had done this ten thousand times. It was as second-nature to them as oiling or dusting their limbs before wrestling or dressing their long hair, which they, fitted now with the linen spolas corselet and bronze breastplate, proceeded to do with elaborate care and ceremony, assisting one another like a regiment of dandies preparing for a dress ball, all the while radiating an eerie presence of calm and nonchalance.
Finally the men scribed their names or signs upon skytalides, the improvised twig bracelets they called tickets, which would distinguish their bodies should they, falling, be maimed too hideously to be identified. They used wood because it was valueless as plunder by the enemy.
Behind the massing men, the omens were being taken. Shields, helmets and foot-long spearpoints had been burnished to a minor's gleam; they flashed brilliantly in the sun, investing the massed formation with the appearance of some colossal milling machine, made not so much of men as of bronze and iron.
Now the Spartans and Tegeates advanced to their positions in the line. First the Skiritai, on the left, forty-eight shields across and eight deep; next the Selassian Stephanos, the Laurel regiment, eleven hundred perioikic hoplites. To the right of these massed the six hundred heavy infantry of Tegea; then the agema of the Knights in the line's center, Polynikes prominent among them, thirty shields across and five deep, to fight around and protect the person of the king. Right of these, dressing their line, moved into place the Wild Olive regiment, a hundred and forty-four across, with the Panther battalion adjacent the Knights, then the Huntress with Olympieus in the forerank, and the Menelaion. On their right, already to their marks, massed the battalions of the Herakles, another hundred and forty-four across, with Dienekes clearly visible at the head of his thirty-six-man enomotia, dividing now into four nine-man files, or stichoi, anchoring the right.
The total, excluding armed squires ranging as auxiliaries, exceeded forty-five hundred and extended wing to wing across the plain for nearly six hundred meters.
From our vantage, Alexandros and I could see Dekton, as tall and muscular as any of the warriors, unarmored in his altar-boy white, leading two she-goats swiftly out to Leoni-das, who stood garlanded with the battle priests before the formation in readiness for the sacrifice. Two goats were needed in case the first bled inpropitiously. The commanders' postures, like those of the massed warriors, projected an air of absolute insouciance.
Across from these the Antirhionians and their Syrakusan allies had massed in their numbers, the same width as the Spartans but six or more shields deeper. The scrapyard hulks had now burned down to ashy skeletons, spewing a blanket of smoke across the field. Beyond these, the stones of the harbor sizzled black in the water, while the spikes of burned-black wharf timbers protruded from the flotsam-choked surface like burial stones; a clotted ash-colored haze obscured what was left of the waterfront.
The wind bore the smoke upon the enemy, upon the massed individuals, the sinews of whose knees and shoulders shivered and quaked beneath the weight of their unaccustomed armor, while their hearts hammered in their breasts and the blood sang in their ears. It took no diviner's gift to discern their state of agitation. Watch their spearpoints, Alexandros said, pointing to the massed foe as they jostled and jockeyed into their ranks. See them tremble. Even the plumes on their helmets are quaking. I looked. In the Spartan line the iron-bladed forest of eight-footers rose solid as a spike fence, each shaft upright and aligned, dressed straight as a geometer's line and none moving. Across among the enemy, shafts wove and wobbled; all save the Syrakusans in the center were misaligned in rank and file. Some shafts actually clattered against their neighbors', chattering like teeth.