The enemy knew it too. They could feel their line caving in. Now at last I found my master.
With a cry of joy I spotted his cross-crested officer's helmet, in the fore, pressing murderously upon a knot of Median lancers who no longer offered attack but only stumbled rearward in terror, casting away their shields as they fouled upon the desperate press of men behind them. I sprinted toward his position, across the open space immediately to the rear of the grinding, gnashing, advancing Spartan line. This strip of hinter ground comprised the only corridor of haven upon the entire field, in the overshot gap between the hand-to-hand slaughter of the line and the beaten zone of the Median archers' arrows, which they flung from the rear of their own lines over the clashing armies toward the Hellenic formations waiting in reserve.
The Median wounded had dragged themselves into this pocket of sanctuary, they and the terrorstricken, the possum players and the exhausted. Enemy bodies were everywhere, the dead and the dying, the trampled and the overrun, the maimed and the massacred. I saw a Mede with a magnificent beard sitting sheepishly upon the ground, cradling his intestines in his hands. As I dashed past, one of his own kinsmen's arrows rained from above, nailing his thigh to the turf. His eyes met mine with the most piteous expression; I don't know why, but I dragged him a halfdozen strides, into the mainland of the pocket of illusory safety. I looked behind. The Tegeates and the Opountian Lokrians, our allies next up into the fray, knelt in their ranks, massed along the line below Lion Stone with their shields interleaved and elevated to deflect the deluge of enemy shafts. The expanse of earth before them bristled like a pincushion, as dense with enemy arrows as the quills of a hedgehog's spine. The palisade of the Wall was afire, blazing with the tow bolts of the enemy by the hundred.
Now the Median lancers cracked. Like a child's game of bowls, their stacked files toppled rearward; bodies fell and tumbled upon one another as those in the fore attempted to flee and those in the rear became entangled pell-mell with their flight. The ground before the Spartan advance became a sea of limbs and torsos, trousered thighs and bellies, the backs of men crawling hand over hand across their fallen comrades, while others, pinned upon their backs, writhed and cried out in their tongue, hands upraised, pleading for quarter.
The slaughter surpassed the mind's capacity to assimilate it. I saw Olympieus thrashing rearward, treading not upon ground, but upon the flesh of the fallen foe, across a carpet of bodies, the wounded as well as the dead, while his squire, Abattus, flanked him, sinking his lizard-sticker, punching the spiked shaft downward like a boatman poling a punt, into the bellies of the yetunslain enemy as they passed. Olympieus advanced into plain view of the allied reserves in position along the Wall. He stripped his helmet so the commanders could see his face, then pumped thrice with his horizontally held spear. Advance! Advance!
With a cry that curdled the blood, they did.
I saw Olympieus pause bareheaded and stare at the foe-strewn earth about him, himself overcome by the scale of the carnage. Then he reseated his helmet; his face vanished beneath the bloodWasted bronze and, summoning his squire, he strode back to the slaughter.
To the rear of the routed lancers stood their brothers, the Median archers. These were drawn up in still-ordered ranks, twenty deep, each bowman in station behind a body-height shield of wicker, its base anchored to the earth with spikes of iron. A no-man's-land of a hundred feet separated the Spartans from this wall of bowmen. The foe now began firing directly into their own lancers, the last pockets of the valiant who yet grappled with the Lakedaemonian advance.
The Medes were shooting their own men in the back.
They didn't care if they slew ten of their brothers, if one lucky bolt could nail a Spartan.
Of all the moments of supreme valor which unfolded throughout this long grisly day, that which the allies upon the Wall now beheld surpassed all, nor could any who witnessed it place any sight beneath heaven alongside it as equal. As the Spartan front routed the last remaining lancers, its forerankers emerged into the open, exposed to what was now the nearly point-blank fire of the Median archers. Leoni-das himself, at his age having survived a melee of murder whose physical expenditure alone would have pressed beyond the limits of endurance even the stoutest youth in his prime, yet summoned the steel to stride to the fore, shouting the order to form up and advance. This command the Lake-daemonians obeyed, if not with the precision of the parade ground, then with a discipline and order beyond imagining under the circumstances. Before the Medes had time to loose their second broadside, they found themselves face-to-face with a front of sixty-plus shields, the lambdas of Lakedaemon obscured beneath horrific layers of mud, gore and blood which ran in rivers down the bronze and dripped from the leather aprons pended beneath the aspides, the oxhide skirts which protected the warriors' legs from precisely the fusillade into which they now advanced. Heavy bronze greaves defended the calves; above each shield rim extended only the armored crowns of the helmets, eye slits alone exposed, while overtopping these waved the front-to-back horsehair plumes of the warriors and the transverse crests of the officers.
The wall of bronze and crimson advanced into the Median fire. Cane arrows ripped with murderous velocity into the Spartan lines. Possessed by terror, an archer will always shoot high; you could hear these overshot shafts hailing and clattering as they ripped at crown height past the Spartan foreranks and tore into the forest of spears held at the vertical; then the missiles tumbled, spent, among the armored ranks. Bronzehead bolts caromed off bronze-faced shields with a sound like a hammer on an anvil, their furious drumming punctuated by the concussive thwock of a dead-on shot penetrating metal and oak so the head lanced through the shield like a nail piercing a board.
I myself had planted shoulder and spine into the back of Medon, senior of the Deukalion mess, whose station of honor stood rearmost of the first file in Dienekes' platoon. The pipers were hunkered immediately in the lee of the formation, unarmed and unarmored, crouching for cover as close to the heels of the rear-rankers as they could without tripping them, all the while summoning breath to skirl out the shrill aulos's beat. The densely packed ranks advanced not in a mobbed disordered charge shouting like savages, but dead silent, sober, almost stately, with a dread deliberateness in time to the pipers' keening wail. Between the fighting fronts, the hundredfoot gap had narrowed to sixty. Now the Medes' fire redoubled. You could hear the orders bawled by their officers and feel the air itself vibrate as the ranks of the foe loosed their fusillades in ever more furious succession.
A single arrow blazing past one's ear can turn the knees to jelly; the honed warhead seems to scream with malevolence, the hurdling weight of the shaft driving its death-dealing cargo; then come the fletched feathers communicating by their silent shriek the homicidal intent of the enemy. A hundred arrows make a different sound. Now the air seems to thicken, to become dense, incandescent; it vibrates like a solid. The warrior feels encapsulated as in a corridor of living steel; reality shrinks to the zone of murder in which he finds himself imprisoned; the sky itself cannot be glimpsed nor even remembered.
Now come a thousand arrows. The sound is like a wall. There is no space within, no interval of haven. Solid as a mountain, impenetrable; it sings with death. And when those arrows are launched not skyward in long-range arcing trajectory to beat upon the target driven by the weight of their own fall, but instead are fired point-blank, dead flush from the chute of the bowman's grip, so that their flight is level, flat, loosed at such velocity and at such close range that the archer does not trouble even to calculate drop into his targeting equation; this is the rain of iron, hellfire at its purest.