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

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!

From where I stood atop the Wall, it seemed as if the Thespians closed to the foe within the space of two heartbeats. Their front ranks hit the Medes not with that sound of thunder, bronze upon bronze, which the Hellenes knew from collisions with their own kind, but with a less dramatic, almost sickening crunch, like ten thousand fistfuls of kindling stalks snapped in the vineyardman's fists, as the metallic facings of the Greeks' shields collided with the wall of wicker thrown up by the Medes. The enemy reeled and staggered. The Thespians' spears rose and plunged. In an instant the killing zone was obscured within a maelstrom of churning dust.

The Spartans atop the wall held motionless as that peculiar bellowslike compression of ranks unfolded before their sight; the first three ranks of the Thespians compacted against the foe and churned like a movable wall upon them; now the succeeding ranks, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and more, between whom an interval had opened in the rush, caught up, wave succeeding wave and compressing one upon the other, as each man elevated his shield to high port and planted it as squarely as his terror-unstrung limbs would permit into the back of the comrade before him, seating his left shoulder beneath the upper rim, and, digging his soles and toes into the earth for purchase, hurled himself with all his force into the melee. The heart stopped with the awe of it, as each warrior of the Thespians cried out to his gods, to the souls of his children, to his mother, to every entity, noble or absurd, which he could imagine of aid, and, forgetting his own life, waded with impossible courage into the mob of murder.

What had been a moment earlier a formation of troops, discernible as ranks and files, even as individuals, transformed in the space of a heartbeat into a roiling mass of manslaughter. The Thespian reserves could not contain themselves; they, too, hurled themselves forward, pressing the weight of their ranks into the backs of their brothers, heaving against the compacted mass of the enemy.

Behind these the Thespians' squires danced like ants on a skillet, unranked and unarmored, some backpedaling in terror, others dashing forward, crying out to each other to remember their courage and not fail the men they served. Toward these servants of the train now sailed a second and third rainbow of arrows, loosed by the massed enemy archers stationed to the rear of their lancers and fired in arching fusillades directly over their comrades' plumed heads. The bronzeheads struck the earth in a ragged but discernible front, like a squall line at sea. One could see this curtain of death withdraw rearward as the Median archers fell back behind their lancers, maintaining an interval so they could concentrate their fire upon the mass of the Greeks assaulting them and not squander it, lobbing shafts over their heads. One Thespian squire dashed recklessly forward to the squall line. A bronzehead nailed him right through the foot. He cavorted off, howling in pain and cursing himself for an idiot.

Forward to Lion Stone!

With a cry, Leonidas dismounted his post atop the Wall and advanced down the stone slope, which had been erected deliberately with a descendible incline, into the open before the Spartans, Mycenaeans and Phliasians. These now followed, as the beaten zone of the enemy's bronzeheads retreated under the furious push of the Thespians, maintaining the dress of their lines, as they had rehearsed half a hundred times in the preceding four days, forming up in ready position on the level ground before the Wall.