Steven Pressfield - Gates of Fire - An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae

Sire, please, for the sake of the army and of those who love you, I beg you preserve the Royal Person, for godly though Your Majesty's spirit may be, yet it is contained within a mortal vessel.

Get some sleep. Do not torment yourself with these cares, which are mere phantoms.

The general Mardonius seconded this with vehemence. Why distress yourself, Lord, with this tale told by a slave? What bearing can the story of obscure officers and their petty internecine wars have upon the events of supreme moment to which we now are committed? Trouble yourself no more with this whimsy woven by a savage, who hates you and Persia with every element of his being. His story is all lies anyway, if you ask me.

His Majesty smiled at these words of his general. On the contrary, my friend, I believe this fellow's tale is true in every regard and, though you may not yet grant it, very much to the point of matters with which we now grapple.''

His Majesty indicated His campaign throne, which stood in the lamplight beneath the pinnacle of the tent. Do you see that chair, my friends? No mortal can be lonelier or more isolated than He if ho sits upon it. You cannot appreciate this, Mardonius. None can who has not sat there.

Consider: whom can a king trust who comes into His hearing;* What man enters before Him but with some secret desire, passion, grievance or claim, which he employs all his artifice and guile to conceal? Who speaks the truth before a king? A man addresses Him either in fear for that which He may seize or in avarice for that which He may bestow. None comes before Him but as a suppliant. His heart's business the flatterer speaks not aloud, but all he obscures beneath the cloak of dissemblance and dissimulation.

Each voice vowing allegiance, each heart declaring love, the Royal Listener must probe and examine as if He were a vendor in a bazaar, seeking the subtle indices of betrayal and deceit.

How tiresome this becomes. A king's own wives whisper sweetly to Him in the darkness of the royal bedchamber. Do they love Him? How can He know, when He perceives their true passion spent in scheming and intriguing for their children's advantage or their own private gain. None speaks the truth whole to a king, not His own brother, not even you, my friend and kinsman.

Mardonius hastened to deny this, but His Majesty cut him short with a smile. Of all those who come before me, only one man, I believe, speaks without desire for private profit. That is this Greek. You do not understand him, Mardonius. His heart yearns for one thing only: to be reunited with his brothers-in-arms beneath the earth. Even his passion to tell their story is secondary, an obligation imposed upon him by one of his gods, which is to him a burden and a curse. He seeks nothing from me. No, my friends, the Greek's words do not trouble or distress.

They please. They restore.

His Majesty, standing then at the threshold of the pavilion, gestured past the guard of the Immortals to the watch fires glowing without.

Consider the crossing at which we now stand encamped, that site the Hellenes call the ThreeCornered Way. It would be noth-ing to us, mere dirt beneath our feet. Yet is not this humble plot given meaning, and even charm, to recall from the prisoner's tale that he, as a child, parted here from the maiden Diomache, his cousin whom he loved?

Artemisia exchanged a glance with Mardonius.

His Majesty yields to sentiment, the lady addressed her King, and fatuous sentiment at that.

At this moment the service portal of the pavilion parted and permission to enter was asked by the detention officers. The Greek was borne in, yet upon his litter, eyes cloth-bound as ever, by two subalterns of the Immortals preceded by Orontes, their captain.

Let us see the man's face, His Majesty commanded, and may his eyes behold ours.

Orontes obeyed. The cloth was removed.

The captive Xeones blinked several times in the lamplight, then looked for the first time upon His Majesty. So striking was the expression which then appeared upon the man's face that the captain remarked angrily upon it and demanded to know what arrogance possessed the fellow to stare so boldly at the Royal Person.

I have looked upon His Majesty's face before, the man replied.

Above the battle, as all the foe have.

No, Captain. Here, in this tent. On the night of the fifth day.

You are a liar! Orontes struck the man in anger. For the breach to which the captive referred had in fact occurred, on the penultimate eve of battle at the Hot Gates, when a night raid of the Spartans bore a handful of their warriors within a spear's thrust of the Royal Presence, inside this very pavilion, before the intruders were driven back by the Immortals and Egyptian marines swarming to His Majesty's defense.

I was here, the Greek responded calmly, and would have had my skull split apart by an axe, hurled at me by a noble, had it not struck first a ridgepole of the tent and embedded itself there.''

At this, the general Mardonius' face lost aft color. In the west portal of the chamber, precisely where the Spartan raid had penetrated, was lodged yet an axehead, driven so deep into the cedar that it could not be extracted without splitting the pole, and so had been left in place by the carpenters, sawn off at the shaft, with the pole repaired and rewound about it with cord.

The Hellene's gaze now; centered directly upon Mardonius. This lord here threw that axe. I recognise his face as well.

The general's expression, for the moment struck dumb, betrayed the truth of this.

His sword, the Greek continued, severed the wrist of a Spartiate warrior, at the moment of drawing back his spear to thrust at His Majesty.

His Majesty inquired of Mardonius if this indeed was true. The general confirmed that he had in fact inflicted such a wound upon an advancing Spartan, among numerous others delivered in those moments of confusion and peril.

That warrior, the man Xeones declared, urn Alexandras, the son Olympieus, of whom I spoke.

The boy who followed the Spartan army? Who swam the channel before Antirhion? Artemisia asked.

Grown to manhood, the Greek confirmed. Those officers who bore him from this tent protected by the shadows of their shields, those were the Knight Polynikes and my master, Dienekes.''

AH paused for several moments, absorbing this.

His Majesty spoke: These truly were the men who penetrated here, into this tent?

They and others, Lord. As His Majesty saw.

The general Mardonius received this intelligence with skepticism bordering on outrage. He accused the prisoner of fabricating this tale from snatches he had overheard from the cooks or medical personnel who attended him. The captive denied this respectfully but with vehemence.

Orontes, responding to Mardonius in his capacity as Commander of the Guard, proclaimed it inconceivable that the Greek could have acquired knowledge of these events in the manner the general suggested. The captain himself had personally overseen the prisoner's sequestration. No one, either of the commissariat or of the Royal Surgeon's staff, had been allowed alone with the man, even for a moment, without the immediate supervision of His Majesty's Immortals, and these were, as ail knew, without peer in scruple and attendance.

Then he has this tale from the rumor mill of the battle, Mardonius rejoined, from the Spartan warriors who did in fact breach His Majesty's line.

All attention now swung to the captive Xeones, who, quite undistressed by these accusations which could have produced his death upon the spot, regarded Mardonius with level gaze and addressed him without fear.

I might have learned of these events, lord, in the manner which you suggest. But how, sir, would I know to recognize you, of all these others, as the man who hurled the axe?