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

The thugs replied in the affirmative.

To my further astonishment, and that of the officers as well, the captain produced from his purse three gold darics, each a month's pay for an armored infantryman, and held this treasure out to the reprobates.

Take this man's body to that temple and remain with it until the priestesses return from their evacuation. They will know what to do with it.

Here one of the officers of the Immortals broke in to protest. Look at these criminals, sir. They are swine! Place gold in their hands and they'll dump man and litter in the first ditch they come to.

No time remained for debate. Orontes, myself and the officers all must make haste to our stations. The captain held up, for the briefest of intervals, examining the faces of the three scoundrels before him.

Do you love your country? he demanded.

The villains' expressions of defiance answered for them.

Orontes indicated the form upon the litter.

This man, with his life, has preserved it. Bear him with honor. There we left him, the corpse of the Spartan Xeones, and in a moment were swept ourselves into the irresistible current of decampment and retreat.

There remain to be appended wo final postscripts regarding the man and the manuscript which will at last round this tale into completion.

As the captain Orontes had predicted, His Majesty took ship for Asia, leading in Greece under command of Mardonius the elite corps of the army, some 300,000 including Orontes himself and the Ten Thousand Immortals, with orders to winter in Thessaly and resume the conflict when campaigning weather returned in the spring. Come that season, so vowed the general Mardonius, the irresistible might of His Majesty's army would once and for ail deliver into subjection the whole of Hellas. I myself remained, in the capacity of historian, upon station with this corps.

At last in the spring His Majesty's land forces faced the Hellenes in battle upon that plain adjacent to the Greek city of Pla-taea, a day's march northwest of Athens.

Across from the 300,000 of Persia, Media, Bactria, India, the Sacae and the Hellenes conscripted under His Majesty's banner stood 100,000 free Greeks, the main force comprised of the full Spartan army-5000 Peers, plus the Lakedaemonian per-ioikoi, armed squires and helots to a total of 75,000-flanked by the hoplite militia of their Peloponnesian allies, the Tegeates. The army's strength was completed by lesser-numbered contingents from a dozen other Greek states, foremost among whom stood the Athenians, to the number of 8000, upon the left.

One need not recount the particulars of that calamitous defeat, so grimly familiar are they to His Majesty, nor the details of the appalling losses to famine and disease of the flower of the Empire upon the long retreat to Asia. It ma? suffice to note, from the perspective of an eyewitness, that everything the man Xeones had forecast proved true. Our warriors beheld again that line of lambdas upon the interleaved shields of Lakedaemon, not this time in breadth of fifty or sixty as in the confines of the Hot Gates, but ten thousand across and eight deep, as Xeones had described them, an invincible tide of bronze and scarlet. The courage of the men of Persia once again proved no match for the valor and magnificent discipline of these warriors of Lakedaemon fighting to preserve their nation's freedom. It is my belief that no force under heaven, however numerous, could have withstood their onslaught upon that day.

In the hot-blood aftermath of the slaughter, the historian's station within the Persian palisade was overrun by two battalions of armed helots. These, under orders of the Spartan commander in chief, Pausanias, to take no prisoners, began butchering without quarter every man of Asia they could la? steel upon. In this exigency I thrust myself forward and began crying out in Greek, imploring the conquerors for mere? for our men.

Such, however, stood the Greeks' fear of the multitudes of the East, even in disarm? and defeat, that none heeded or gave pause. Hands were laid upon my own person and my throat drawn back beneath the blade. Inspired perhaps by God Ahura Mazda, or in the instance by terror alone, I found my voice crying out from memory the names of those Spartans of whom the man Xeones had spoken. Leonidas. Dienekes. Alexandras. Polynikes. Rooster. At once the helot warriors drew up their swords. All slaughter ceased.

Spartiate officers appeared and restored order to the mob of their armored serfs. I was hauled forward, hands bound, and dumped upon the earth before one of the Spartans, a magnificentlookmg warrior, his flesh yet steaming with the gore and tissue of conquest. The helots had informed him of the names I had cried out. The warrior stood over my kneeling form, regarding me gravely.

Do you know who I am? he demanded. I replied that I did not.

I am Dekton, son of Idotychides. It was my name you called when you cried 'Rooster.' '

Scruple compels me here to state that what spare physical description the captive Xeones had supplied of this man failed in all ways to do him justice. The warrior who stood above me was a splendid specimen in the prime of youth and vigor, six feet and more in stature, possessed of a comeliness of person and nobility of bearing that belied utterly the mean birth and station from which, it was clear, he had in the interval arisen.

I now knelt within this man's power, pleading for mercy. I told him of his comrade Xeones' survival following the battle at Thermopylae, his resuscitation by the Royal Surgeon's staff and his dictation of the document by which I, its transcriber, had acquired knowledge of those names of the Spartans which I had, seeking pity, cried out.

By now a dozen other Spartiate warriors had clustered, encircling my kneeling form. As one, the} scorned the document un-seen and denounced me for a liar.

What fiction of Persian heroism is this you have concocted of your own fancy, scribe? one among them demanded. Some carpet of lies woven to flatter your King?

Others declared that they knew well the man Xeones, squire of Dienekes. How dare I cite his name, and that of his noble master, in craven endeavor to save my own skin?

Throughout this, the man Dekton called Rooster held silent. When the others' fury had at last spent itself, he put to me one question only, with Spartan brevity: where had the man Xeones last been seen?

His body dispatched with honor by the Persian captain Orontes to that temple of Athens called by the Hellenes Persephone of the Veil.

At this the Spartan Dekton elevated his hand in clemency This stranger speaks true. His comrade Xeones' ashes, he confirmed, had been restored to Sparta, delivered months prior to this dart's battle by a priestess of that very temple, Hearing this, all strength fled my knees. I sank upon the earth, overcome by the apprehension of my own and our army's annihilation and by the irony of discovering myself now before the Spartans in that selfsame posture which the man Xeones had been compelled to assume before the warriors of Asia, that of the vanquished and the enslaved.

The general Mardonius had perished in the battle at Plataea, and the captain Orontes as well.

Yet now the Spartans believed me, my life was spared.

I was held at Plataea in the custody of the Hellenic allies, treated with consideration and courtesy, for most of the following month, then assigned as a captive interpreter to the staff of the Allied Congress.

This document, in the end, preserved my life.

An aside, as to the battle. His Majesty may recall the name Aristodemos, the Spartan officer mentioned on several occasions by the man Xeones as an envoy and, later, as among the Three Hundred at the Hot Gates. This man alone among the Peers survived, having been evacuated due to field blindness prior to the final morning.