This selfsame sound, multiplied a hundred-thousandfold, now rose from the massed compacted crush of men and armor roiling beneath us on the plain. Now I understood the poet's phrase the mill of Ares and apprehended in my flesh why the Spartans speak of war as work. I felt Alexandras' fingernails dig into the flesh of my arm.
Can you see my father? Do you see Dienekes?
Dienekes waded into the rout below us; we could see his cross-crested curry brush at the right of the Herakles, in the fore of the third platoon. As disordered as were the ranks of the enemy, so held the Spartans' intact and cohesive. Their forerank did not charge wildly upon the foe, flailing like savages, nor did they advance with the stolid precision of the parade ground. Rather they surged, in unison, like a line of warships on the ram. I had never appreciated how far beyond the interleaved bronze of the promachoi's shields the murderous iron of their eight-footers could extend. These punched and struck, overhand, driven by the full force of the right arm and shoulder, across the upper rim of the shield; not just the spears of the front-rankers but those of the second and even the third, extending over their mates' shoulders to form a thrashing engine that advanced like a wall of murder. As wolves in a pack take down the fleeing deer, so did the Spartan right fall upon the defenders of Antirhion, not in frenzied shrieking rage, lip-curled and fang-bared, but predator-like, cold-blooded, applying the steel with the wordless cohesion of the killing pack and the homicidal efficiency of the hunt.
Dienekes was turning them. Wheeling his platoon to take the enemy in flank. They were in the smoke now. It became impossible to see. Dust rose in such quantities beneath the churning feet of the men, commingling with the screen of smoke from the tindered hulks, that the entire plain seemed afire, and from the choking cloud arose that sound, that terrible indescribable sound. We could sense rather than see the Herakles lochos, directly beneath us where the dust and smoke were thinner. They had routed the enemy left; their front ranks now surged into the business of cutting down those luckless bastards who had fallen or been trampled or whose panic-unstrung knees could not find strength to bear them swiftly enough from their own slaughter. On the center and right, along the whole line the Spartans and Syrakusans clashed now shield-to-shield, helmet-to-helmet. Amid the maelstrom we could catch only glimpses, and those primarily of the rear-rankers, eight deep on the Lakedaemonian side, twelve and sixteen deep on the Syrakusan, as they thrust the three-foot-wide bowls of their hoplon shields flush against the backs of the men in file before them and heaved and ground and shoved with all their strength, the soles of their footgear churning up trenches in the plain and slinging yet more dust into the already choking air.
No longer was it possible to distinguish individual men, or even units. We could see only the tidal surge and back-surge of the massed formations and hear without ceasing that terrible, bloodstill ing sound.
As when a flood descends from the mountains and the wall of water crashes down the dry courses, smashing into the stone-founded stakes and woven brush of the husbandman's dam, so did the Spartan line surge against the massed weight of the Syrakusans. The dam's bulk, founded as firmly against the flood as fear and forethought may devise, seems itself to dig in and hold, to plant its force fiercely into the earth, and for long moments displays no sign of buckling. But then, as the anxious planter watches, before his eyes a surge begins to capsize one deep-sunken stake, another rush undermines a stacked stone revetment. Into each fraction of a breach, the force and weight of the downrushing wave thrusts itself irresistibly, hammering deeper, tearing and gouging, widening the gap and exploiting it with each successive ripping surge.
Now the dam wall which had cracked only a hand-breadth splits to a foot and then a yard. The mass of the plunging flood builds upon itself, as ton upon ton plummets in from the courses above, adding its weight to the irresistible ever-mounting tide. Along the banked margins of the watercourse, sheets of earth calve into the churning, boiling torrent. So now did the Syrakusan center, pounded and hammered by the Tegeate heavy infantry, the king and the Knights and the massed battalions of the Wild Olive, begin to peel and founder.
The Skiritai had routed the enemy right. From the left the battalions of the Herakles rolled up the enemy flank. Each Syrakusan wingman forced to wheel to defend his unshielded side meant another drawn off from the forward push against the frontally advancing Spartans. The sound of the keening struggle seemed to rise for a moment, then went dead silent as desperate men summoned every reserve of valor from their shrieking, exhausted limbs. An eternity passed in the time it takes to draw a dozen breaths, and then, with the same sickening sound made by the mountain dam as it gives way unable to withstand the onrushing torrent, the Syrakusan line cracked and broke.
Now in the dust and fire of the plain the slaughter began.
A shout, half of joy and half of awe, sprung from the throats of the crimson-tunicked Spartans.
Back the Syrakusan line fell, not in rout and riot as their allies the An-tirhionians had done, but in still-disciplined squads and bunches, held yet by their officers, or whatever brave men had taken it upon themselves to act as officers, maintaining their shields to the fore and closing ranks as they retreated. It was no use. The Spartan front-rankers, men of the first five age-classes, were the cream of the city in foot speed and strength, none save the officers over twenty-five years old.
Many, like Polynikes in the van among the Knights, were sprinters of Olympic and near-Olympic stature with garland after garland won in games before the gods.
These now, loosed by Leonidas and driven on by their own lust for glory, pressed home the sentence of steel upon the fleeing Syrakusans.
When the trumpeters had blown the salpinx and its mind-numbing wail sounded the call to still the slaughter, even the rawest untrained eye could read the field like a book.
There, on the Spartan right where the Herakles regiment had routed the Antirhionians, one saw the turf unchurned and the field beyond littered with enemy shields and helmets, spears and even breastplates, flung aside by the stampeding foe in his flight.
Bodies lay scattered at intervals, facedown, with the shameful gashes of death delivered upon their fleeing backs.
On the right where the stronger troops of the enemy had held longer against the Skiritai, the carnage spread thicker and more dense, the turf chewed more fiercely; along the battle wall which the foe had erected to anchor its flank, clumps of corpses could be seen, slain as they, trapped by their own wall, had struggled in vain to scale it.
Then the eye found the center, where the slaughter had achieved its most savage concentration.
Here the earth was rent and torn as if a thousand span of oxen had assaulted it all day with the might of their hooves and the steel of their ploughs' deep-churning blades. The chewed-up dirt, dark with piss and blood, extended in a line three hundred meters across and a hundred deep where the feet of the contending formations had heaved and strained for purchase upon the earth.
Bodies sprawled like a carpet upon the earth, mounded in places two and three deep. To the rear, across the plain where the Syrakusans had fled, and along the riven walls of the watercourse, more corpses could be seen in scattered perimeters manned by two and three, five and seven, where these in their flight had closed ranks and made their stand, doomed as castles of sand against the tide. They fell with wounds of honor, facing their Spartan foe, cut down from the front.