Laughter from the men. I hear the whispers, and sometimes they're not such whispers. More laughter. Leonidas hears voices the rest of us don't. He takes chances with his life in an unkingly manner and prepares for war against an enemy he has never seen and who many say will never come. All this is true…
The men laughed again. But hear this and never forget it: the Persian will come. He will come in numbers dwarfing those he sent four years ago when the Athenians and Platae-ans defeated him so gloriously on the plain of Marathon. He will come tenfold, a hundredfold, mightier. And he will come soon.
Leonidas paused again, the heat in his breast making his face flush and his eyes bum with fever and conviction.
Listen to me, brothers. The Persian is not a king as Kleomenes was to us or as I am to you now.
He does not take his place with shield and spear amid the manslaughter, but looks on, safe, from a distance, atop a hill, upon a golden throne. Murmured jeers rose from the men's throats as Leonidas spoke this. His comrades are not Peers and Equals, free to speak their minds before him without fear, but slaves and chattel. Each man, even the noblest, is deemed not an equal before God, but the King's property, counted no more than a goat or a pig, and driven into battle not by love of nation or liberty, but by the lash of other slaves' whips.
This King has tasted defeat at the Hellenes' hands, and it is bitter to his vanity. He comes now to revenge himself, but he comes not as a man worthy of respect, but as a spoiled and petulant child, in its tantrum when a toy is snatched from it by a playmate. I spit on this King's crown. I wipe my ass on his throne, which is the seat of a slave and which seeks nothing more noble than to make all other men slaves.
Everything I have done as king and everything Kle-omenes has performed before me, every enemy courted, every confederation forged, every weak-kneed ally brought to heel, has been for this single event: the day when Darius, or one of his sons, returns to Hellas to pay us out.
Leonidas lifted now the basket which held the tickets of the fallen.
That is why these, better men than ourselves, gave their lives here today, why they consecrated this earth with their heroes blood. This is the meaning of their sacrifice. They have dumped their guts not in this piss-puddle war we fought today, but in the first of many battles in the greater war which God in heaven and all of you in your hearts know is coming. These brothers are heroes of that war, which will be the gravest and most calamitous in history.
On that day, and Leonidas gestured out over the gulf, to Antirhion below and Rhion across the channel, on that day when the Persian brings his multitudes against us via this strait, he will find not clear passage and paid-for friends, but enemies united and implacable, Hellene allies who will sally to meet him from both shores. And if he chooses some other route, if his spies report what awaits him here and he elects another passage, some other site of battle where land and sea play to our greater advantage, it will be because of what we did today, because of the sacrifice of these our brothers whose bodies we inter now within a hero's grave.
Therefore I have not waited for the Syrakusans and the Antirhionians, our enemies this day, to send their heralds to us as is customary to entreat our permission to retrieve the bodies of their slain. I have dispatched our runners to them first, offering them truce without rancor, with generosity. Let our new allies reclaim unprofaned the armor of their fallen, let them recover undefiled the bodies of their husbands and sons.
Let those we spared this day stand beside us in line of battle on that day when we teach the Persian once and for all what valor free men can bring to bear against slaves, no matter how vast their numbers or how fiercely they are driven on by their child-king's whip.
Book Three. Rooster
Chapter Twelve
At this point in the recounting of the tale, an unfortunate incident occurred regarding the Greek Xeones. A subordinate of the Royal Surgeon, during the ongoing attendance upon the captive's wounds, unwittingly informed the fellow of the fate of Leonidas, the Spartan king and commander at Thermopylae, after the battle at the Hot Gates, and what sacrilege, to the Greek's eyest His Majesty's troops had performed upon the corpse after it was recovered from the heaps of the dead following the slaughter. The prisoner had hitherto been in ignorance of this.
The man's outrage mas immediate and extreme. He forthwith refused to speak any further on the subjects to hand and in fact demanded of his immediate captors, Orontes and the officers of the Immortals, that they put him also to death, and at once. The man Xeones stood clearly in a state of extreme consternation over the beheading and crucifixion of the body of his king. All arguments, threats and blandishments failed to dislodge him from this posture of grief.
It was clear to the captain Orontes that, should His Majesty be informed of the prisoner's defiance, however much He Himself desired to hear the continuance of the man's tale, the captive Xeones must, for his insolence to the Royal Person, be put to death. The captain, truth to tell, feared as well for his own head and those of his officers, should His Majesty be frustrated by the Greek's intransigence in His desire to learn all He could about the Spartan enemy.
Orontes had become, through various informal exchanges with the fellow Xeones during the course of the interrogation, something of a confidant and even, if the word's meaning may fee stretched to this point, a friend. He sought upon his own initiative to soften the captive's stance.
To that end he attempted to make clear to the Greek the following:
That the physical desecration performed upon the corpse of Leonidas was regretted keenly by His Majesty almost as soon as He had ordered it. The actual command had been issued amid the grief of the batik's aftermath, when His Majesty's blood was raging over the loss before his own eyes of thousands, by some counts as many as twenty thousand, of the Empire's finest warriors slain by the troops of Leonidas, whose defiance of God Ahura Mazda's will could only be perceived through Persian eyes as an outrage against heaven. In addition two of His Majesty's own brothers, Habrocomes and Hyperanthes, and more than thirty royal kinsmen had been sent down to the house of death by the Spartan foe and their allies.
Moreover, the captain appended, the mutilation of Leonidas' corpse was, when viewed in the apposite light, a testament to the respect and awe in which the Spartan king was held by His Majesty, for against no other commander of the enemy had He ever ordered such extreme and, to Hellenic eyes, barbarous retribution.
The man Xeones remained unmoved by these arguments and repeated his desire to be dispatched at once. He refused all food and water. It seemed that the telling of his tale would be broken off here and not resumed.
It was at this point, fearing that the situation could not be kept from His Majesty much longer, that Orontes sought out Demaratos, the deposed king of Sparta residing within the court as a guest exile and advisor, and urged his intercession. Demaratos, responding, betook himself in person to the Royal Surgeon's tent and there spoke alone with the captive Xeones for more than an hour. When he emerged, he informed the captain Orontes that the man had experienced a change of heart and was now willing to continue the interrogation.
The crisis had passed. Tell me, the captain Orontes inquired, much relieved, what argument and persuasion did you employ to effect this turnabout?
Demaratos replied that of all the Hellenes the Spartans were acknowledged the most pious and held the gods most in awe. He declared it his own observation that in this regard among the Lakedaemonians, the lesser rankers and those in service, particularly the outlanders of the captive Xeones' station, were almost without exception, in Demaratos' phrase, more Spartan than the Spartans.