Obscene gestures and shouted insults rose from four thousand Greek throats.
His Majesty rose with aplomb in response to the jeers. He gestured elegantly and, it seemed, with humor, as if acknowledging the adulation of his subjects. He bowed with a flourish. It seemed, though the distance was too great to be sure, as if he were smiling. He saluted his own captains and settled regally upon his throne.
My place was on the Wall, thirty stations in from the left flank anchored by the mountain. I could see, as could all the Thespians before the Wall and every Lakedaemonian, Mycenaean and Phliasian atop it, the captains of the enemy, advancing now to the sound of their trumpets, in the van before the massed ranks of their infantry. My God, they looked handsome. Six division commanders, each, it seemed, taller and nobler than the next. We learned later that these were not merely the flower of the Median aristocracy, but that their ranks were reinforced by the sons and brothers of those who had been slain ten years earlier by the Greeks at Marathon. But what froze the blood was their demeanor. Their carriage shone forth, bold to the point of contemptuous. They would brush the defenders aside, that's what they thought. The meat of their lunch was already roasting, back down in camp. They would polish us off without raising a sweat, then return to dine at their leisure.
I glanced to Alexandras; his brow glistened, pale as a winding sheet; his wind came in strangled, wheezing gasps. My master stood at his shoulder, one pace to the fore. Dienekes' attention held riveted to the Medes, whose massed ranks now filled the Narrows and seemed to extend endlessly beyond, out of sight along the track. But no emotion disclari-fied his reason. He was gauging them strategically, coolly assessing their armament and the bearing of their officers, the dress and interval of their ranks. They were mortal men like us; was their vision struck, like ours, with awe of the force which stood now opposed to them? Leonidas had stressed again and again to the officers of the Thespians that their men's shields, greaves and helmets must be bossed to the most brilliant sheen possible. These now shone like mirrors. Above the rims of the bronzefaced aspides, each helmet blazed magnificently, overtopped with a lofty horsehair crest, which as it trembled and quavered in the breeze not only created the impression of daunting height and stature but lent an aspect of dread which cannot be communicated in words but must be beheld to be understood.
Adding further to the theater of terror presented by the Hellenic phalanx and, to my mind most frightful of all, were the blank, expressionless facings of the Greek helmets, with their bronze nasals thick as a man's thumb, their flaring cheekpieces and the unholy hollows of their eye slits, covering the entire face and projecting to the enemy the sensation that he was facing not creatures of flesh like himself, but some ghastly invulnerable machine, pitiless and unquenchable. I had laughed with Alexandros not two hours earlier as he seated the helmet over his felt undercap; how sweet and boyish he appeared in one instant, with the helmet cocked harmlessly back upon his brow and the youthful, almost feminine features of his face exposed.
Then with one undramatic motion, his right hand clasped the flare of the cheekpiece and tugged the ghastly mask down; in an instant the humanity of his face vanished, his gentle expressive eyes became unseeable pools of blackness chasmed within the fierce eye sockets of bronze; all compassion fled in an instant from his aspect, replaced with the blank mask of murder. Push it back, I cried. You're scaring the hell out of me. It was no joke.
This now Dienekes was assessing, the effect of Hellenic armor upon the enemy. My master's eyes scanned the foe's ranks; you could see piss stains darkening the trouser fronts of more than one man. Spear tips shivered here and there. Now the Medes formed up. Each rank found its mark, each commander his station.
More endless moments passed. Tedium stood displaced by terror. Now the nerves began to scream; the blood pounded within the recesses of the ears. The hands went numb; all sensation fled the limbs. One's body seemed to treble in weight, all of it cold as stone. One heard one's own voice calling upon the gods and could not tell if the sound was in his head or if he was shamefully crying aloud.
His Majesty's vantage may have been too elevated upon the overstanding mountain to descry what happened next, what stroke of heaven immediately precipitated the clash. It was this. Of a sudden a hare started from the cliffside, dashing out directly between the two armies, no more than thirty feet from the Thespian commander, Xenocratides, who stood foremost in advance of his troops, flanked by his captains, Dithyrambos and Protokreon, all of them garlanded, with their helmets tucked under their arms. At the sight of this wildly sprinting prey, the roan bitch Styx, who had been already barking furiously, loose at the right flank of the Greek formation, now bolted like a shot into the open. The effect would have been comical had not every Hellene's eye seized upon the event at once as a sign from heaven and attended breathlessly upon its outcome.
The hymn to Artemis, which the troops were singing, faltered in midbreath. The hare fled straight for the Median front-rankers, with Styx hot on its heels and mad with pursuit. Both beasts appeared as screaming blurs, the puffs of dust from their churning feet hanging motionless in the air while their bodies, stretched to the full in the race, streaked on before them. The hare sped straight toward the mass of the Medians, at the approach to which it panicked and tore into a tumble, end over end, as it attempted a right-angle turn at top speed. In a flash Styx was on it; the hound's jaws seemed to snap the prey in two, but, to the astonishment of all, the hare burst free, unscathed, and in an eyeblink had regained full velocity in flight.
A zigzag chase ensued, in duration fewer than a dozen heartbeats, in which hare and hound traversed thrice the oudenos chorion, the no-man's-land, between the armies. A hare will always flee uphill; its forelegs are shorter than its rear. The speedster sprung now for the mountain wall, attempting to scamper to salvation. But the face was too sheer; the fugitive's feet skidded out from under; it tumbled, fell back. In an instant its form hung limp and broken within the Stygian jaws.
A cheer rose from the throats of four thousand Greeks, certain that this was an omen of victory, the answer to the hymn it had so serendipitously interrupted. But now from the ranks of the Medes stepped forth two archers. As Styx turned, seeking his master to show off the prize, a pair of cane arrows, launched from no farther than twenty yards and striking simultaneously, slammed into the beast's flank and throat, tumbling him head over heels into the dust.
A cry of anguish erupted from the Skirite whom all had come to call Hound. For agonizing moments his dog flopped and writhed, pinioned mortally by the enemy's shafts. We heard the enemy commander cry an order in his tongue. At once a thousand Median archers elevated their bows. Here it comes! someone cried from the Wall. Every Hellene's shield was snatched at once to high port. That sound which is not a sound but a silence, a rip like that of fabric torn in the wind, now keened from the fisted grips of the enemy's massed bowmen as their string hands released and their triple-pointed bronzeheads sprung as one into the air, shafts singing, driving them forward.
While these missiles arced yet through the aether, the Thespian commander, Xenocratides, seized the instant. Zeus Thunderer and Victory! he cried, tearing the garland from his brow and jerking his helmet down into position of combat, covering, save the eye slits, his entire face. In an instant every man of the Hellenes followed suit. A thousand arrows rained on them in homicidal deluge. The Alpine bellowed. Thespiae!