GATES
of  FIRE

BY ORDER OF HIS MAJESTY, XERXES SON OF DARIUS, great king of Persia and Media, King of Kings, King of the Lands; Master of Libya, Egypt, Arabia, Ethiopia, Babylonia, Chaldea, Phoenicia, Elam, Syria, Assyria and the nations of Palestine; Ruler of Ionia, Lydia, Phrygia, Armenia, Cilicia, Cappadocia, Thrace, Macedonia and the trans-Caucasus, Cyprus, Rhodes, Samos, Chios, Lesbos and the islands of the Aegean; Sovereign Lord of Parthia, Bactria, Caspia, Sousiana, Paphlagonia and India; Lord of all men from the rising to the setting sun, His Most Holy, Reverend and Exalted, Invincible, Incorruptible, Blessed of God Ahura Mazda and Omnipotent among Mortals. Thus decreeth His Magnificence, as recorded by Gobartes the son of Artabazos, His historian:

That, following the glorious victory of His Majesty’s forces over the arrayed Peloponnesian foe, Spartans and allies, at the pass of Thermopylae, having extinguished the enemy to the last man and erected trophies to this valorous conquest, yet was His Majesty in His God-inspired wisdom desirous of further intelligence, both of certain infantry tactics employed by the enemy which proved of some effect against His Majesty’s troops, and of the type of foemen these were who, though unbound by liege law or servitude, facing insuperable odds and certain death, yet chose to remain at their stations, and perished therein to the final man.

His Majesty’s regret having been expressed at the dearth of knowledge and insight upon these subjects, then did intercede God Ahura Mazda on His Majesty’s behalf. A survivor of the Hellenes (as the Greeks call themselves) was discovered, grievously wounded and in a state of extremis, beneath the wheels of a battle wagon, being unseen theretofore due to the presence of numerous corpses of men, horses and beasts of transport being heaped upon the site. His Majesty’s surgeons being summoned and charged under pain of death to spare no measure to preserve the captive’s life, God yet granted His Majesty’s desire. The Greek survived the night and the morning following. Within ten days the man had recovered speech and mental faculty and, though yet confined to a litter and under direct care of the Royal Surgeon, was able not only at last to speak but to express his fervent desire to do so.

Several unorthodox aspects of the captive’s armour and raiment were noted by the detaining officers. Beneath the man’s battle helmet was found not the traditional felt cawl of the Spartan hoplite, but the dogskin cap associated with the race of helots, the Lakedaemonian slave class, serfs of the land. In contrast inexplicable to His Majesty’s officers, the prisoner’s shield and armour were of the finest bronze, etched with rare Hibernian cobalt, while his helmet bore the transverse crest of a full Spartiate, an officer.

In preliminary interviews, the man’s manner of speech proved to be a compound of the loftiest philosophical and literary language, indicative of a deep familiarity with the epics of the Hellenes, intermingled with the coarsest and most crude gutter argot, much of which was uninterpretable even to His Majesty’s most knowledgeable translators. The Greek, however, willingly agreed to translate these himself, which he did, utilizing scraps of profane Aramaic and Persian which he claimed to have acquired during certain sea travels beyond Hellas. I, His Majesty’s historian, seeking to preserve His Majesty’s ears from the foul and often execrable language employed by the captive, sought to excise the offensive material before His Majesty was forced to endure hearing it. Yet did His Majesty in His God-inspired wisdom instruct His servant so to translate the man’s speech as to render it in whatever tongue and idiom necessary to duplicate the precise effect in Greek. This have I attempted to do. I pray that His Majesty recall the charge He imparted and hold His servant blameless for those portions of the following transcription which will and must offend any civilized hearer.

Inscribed and submitted this sixteenth day of Ululu, Fifth Year of His Majesty’s Accession.

ONE

THIRD DAY OF TASHRITU, FIFTH YEAR OF HIS MAJESTY’S accession, south of the Lokrian border, the Army of the Empire having continued its advance unopposed into central Greece, establishing an encampment opposite the eastern fall of Mount Parnassus, the sum of whose watercourses, as numerous others before upon the march from Asia, failed and was drunk dry by the troops and horses.

The following initial interview took place in His Majesty’s campaign tent, three hours after sunset, the evening meal having been concluded and all court business transacted. Field marshals, advisers, household guards, the Magi and secretaries being present, the detaining officers were instructed to produce the Greek. The captive was brought in upon a litter, eyes clothbound so as to dissanction sight of His Majesty. The Magus performed the incantation and purification, permitting the man to speak within the hearing of His Majesty. The prisoner was instructed not to speak directly towards the Royal Presence but to address himself to the officers of the household guard, the Immortals, stationed upon His Majesty’s left.

The Greek was directed by Orontes, captain of the Immortals, to identify himself. He responded that his name was Xeones the son of Skamandridas of Astakos, a city in Akarnania. The man Xeones stated that he wished first to thank His Majesty for preserving his life and to express his gratitude for and admiration of the skill of the Royal Surgeon’s staff. Speaking from his litter, and yet struggling with weakness of breath from several as-yet-unhealed wounds of the lungs and thoracic organs, he offered the following disclaimer to His Majesty, stating that he was unfamiliar with the Persian style of discourse and further stood unfortunately lacking in the gifts of poesy and story-spinning. He declared that the tale he could tell would not be of generals or kings, for the political machinations of the great, he said, he was and had been in no position to observe. He could only relate the story as he himself had lived it and witnessed it, from the vantage of a youth and squire of the heavy infantry, a servant of the battle train. Perhaps, the captive declared, His Majesty would discover little of interest in this narrative of the ordinary warriors, the ‘men in the line’, as the prisoner expressed it.

His Majesty, responding through Orontes, captain of the Immortals, asserted to the contrary that this was precisely the tale he wished most to hear. His Majesty was, He declared, already possessed of abundant intelligence of the intriguings of the great; what He desired most to hear was this, ‘the infantryman’s tale’.

What kind of men were these Spartans, who in three days had slain before His Majesty’s eyes no fewer than twenty thousand of His most valiant warriors? Who were these foemen, who had taken with them to the house of the dead ten or, as some reports said, as many as twenty for every one of their own fallen? What were they like as men? Whom did they love? What made them laugh? His Majesty knew they feared death, as all men. By what philosophy did their minds embrace it? Most to the point, His Majesty said, He wished to acquire a sense of the individuals themselves, the real flesh-and-blood men whom He had observed from above the battlefield, but only indistinctly, from a distance, as indistinguishable identities concealed within the blood- and gore-begrimed carapaces of their helmets and armour.

Beneath his cloth-bound eyes, the prisoner bowed and offered a prayer of thanksgiving to some one of his gods. The story His Majesty wished to hear, he asserted, was the one he could truly tell, and the one he most wished to.

It must of necessity be his own story, as well as that of the warriors he had known. Would His Majesty be patient with this? Nor could the telling confine itself exclusively to the battle, but must proceed from events antecedent in time, for only in this light and from this perspective would the lives and actions of the warriors His Majesty observed at Thermopylae be given their true meaning and significance.

His Majesty, field marshals, generals and advisers being satisfied, the Greek was given a bowl of wine and honey for his thirst and asked to commence where he pleased, to tell the story in whatever manner he deemed appropriate. The man, Xeones, bowed once upon his litter and began:

I had always wondered what it felt like to die.

There was an exercise we of the battle train practised when we served as punching bags for the Spartan heavy infantry. It was called the Oak because we took our positions along a line of oaks at the edge of the plain of Otona, where the Spartiates and the Gentleman-Rankers ran their field exercises in autumn and winter. We would line up ten deep with body-length wicker shields braced upon the earth and they would hit us, the shock troops, coming across the flat in line of battle, eight deep, at a walk, then a pace, then a trot and finally a dead run. The shock of their interleaved shields was meant to knock the breath out of you, and it did. It was like being hit by a mountain. Your knees, no matter how braced you held them, buckled like saplings before an earthslide; in an instant all courage fled our hearts; we were rooted up like dried stalks before the ploughman’s blade.

That was how it felt to die. The weapon which slew me at Thermopylae was an Egyptian hoplite spear, driven in beneath the plexus of the ribcage. But the sensation was not what one would have anticipated, not being pierced but rather slammed, like we sparring fodder felt beneath the oaks.

I had imagined that the dead would be detached. That they would look upon life with the eyes of objective wisdom. But the experience proved the opposite. Emotion ruled. It seemed nothing remained but emotion. My heart ached and broke as never it could on earth. Loss encompassed me with a searing, all-mastering pain. I saw my wife and children, my dear cousin Diomache, she whom I loved. I saw Skamandridas, my father, and Eunike, my mother, Bruxieus, Dekton and ‘Suicide’, names which mean nothing to His Majesty to hear, but which to me were dearer than life and now, dying, dearer still.

Away they flew. Away I flew from them.

I was keenly conscious of the comrades-in-arms who had fallen with me. A bond surpassing by a hundredfold that which I had known in life bound me to them. I felt a sense of inexpressible relief and realized that I had feared, more than death, separation from them. I apprehended that excruciating war survivor’s torment, the sense of isolation and self-betrayal experienced by those who had elected to cling yet to breath when their comrades had let loose their grip.

That state which we call life was over.

I was dead.

And yet, titanic as was that sense of loss, there existed a keener one which I now experienced and felt my brothers-in-arms feeling with me. It was this.

That our story would perish with us.

That no one would ever know.

I cared not for myself, for my own selfish or vainglorious purposes, but for them. For Leonidas, for Alexandros and Polynikes, for Arete bereft by her hearth and, most of all, for Dienekes. That his valour, his wit, his private thoughts that I alone was privileged to share, that these and all that he and his companions had achieved and suffered would simply vanish, drift away like smoke from a woodland fire, this was unbearable.

We had reached the river now. We could hear with ears that were no longer ears and see with eyes that were no longer eyes the stream of Lethe and the hosts of the long-suffering dead whose round beneath the earth was at last drawing to a close. They were returning to life, drinking of those waters which would efface all memory of their existence here as shades.

But we from Thermopylae, we were aeons away from drinking of Lethe’s stream. We remembered.

A cry which was not a cry but only the multiplied pain of the warriors’ hearts, all feeling what I, too, felt, rent the baleful scene with unspeakable pathos.

Then from behind me, if there can be such a thing as ‘behind’ in that world where all directions are as one, came a glow of such sublimity that I knew, we all knew at once, it could be nothing but a god.

Phoebus Far Darter, Apollo himself in war armour, moved there among the Spartiates and Thespians. No words were exchanged; none were needed. The Archer could feel the men’s agony and they knew without speech that he, warrior and physician, was there to succour it. So quickly that surprise was impossible I felt his eye turn towards me, me the last and least who could expect it, and then Dienekes himself was beside me, my master in life.

I would be the one. The one to go back and speak. A pain beyond all previous now seized me. Sweet life itself, even the desperately sought chance to tell the tale, suddenly seemed unendurable alongside the pain of having to take leave of these whom I had come so to love.

But again, before the god’s majesty, no entreaty was possible.

I saw another light, a sicklier, cruder, more coarse illumination, and knew that it was the sun. I was soaring back. Voices came to me through physical ears. Soldiers’ speech, in Egyptian and Persian, and leather-gauntleted fists pulling me from beneath a sheaf of corpses.

The Egyptian marines told me later that I had uttered the word lokas, which in their tongue meant ‘fuck’, and they had laughed even as they dragged my shattered body out into the light of day.

They were wrong. The word was Loxias – the Greek title of respect for Apollo the Cunning, or Apollo Crabwise, whose oracles arise ever elusive and oblique – and I was half crying to him, half cursing him for laying this terrible responsibility on me who had no gift to perform it.

As poets call upon the Muse to speak through them, I croaked my inarticulate grunt to the Striker From Afar.

If indeed you have elected me, Archer, then let your fine-fletched arrows spring from my bow. Lend me your voice, Far Darter. Help me to tell the tale.

TWO

THERMOPYLAE IS A SPA, THE WORD IN GREEK MEANS ‘HOT gates’, from the thermal springs and, as His Majesty knows, the narrow and precipitous defiles which form the only passages by which the site may be approached – in Greek, pylae or pylai, the East and West Gates.

The Phokian Wall around which so much of the most desperate fighting took place was not constructed by the Spartans and their allies in the event, but stood in existence prior to the battle, erected in ancient times by the inhabitants of Phokis and Lokris as defence against the incursions of their northern neighbours, the Thessalians and Macedonians. The wall, when the Spartans arrived to take possession of the pass, stood in ruins. They rebuilt it.

The springs and pass themselves are not considered by the Hellenes to belong to the natives of the area, but are open to all in Greece. The baths are thought to possess curative powers; in summer the site teems with visitors. His Majesty beheld the charm of the shaded groves and pool houses, the oak copse sacred to Amphiktyon and that pleasantly meandering path bounded by the Lion’s Wall, whose stones are said to have been set in place by Herakles himself. Along this in peacetime are customarily arrayed the gaily coloured tents and booths used by the vendors from Trachis, Anthela and Alpenoi to serve whatever adventurous pilgrims have made the trek to the mineral baths.

There is a double spring sacred to Persephone, called the Skyllian fountain, at the foot of the bluff beside the Middle Gate. Upon this site the Spartans established their camp, between the Phokian Wall and the hillock where the final tooth-and-nail struggle took place. His Majesty knows how little drinking water is to hand from other sources in the surrounding mountains. The earth between the Gates is normally so parched and dust-blown that servants are employed by the spa to oil the walkways for the convenience of the bathers. The ground itself is hard as stone.

His Majesty saw how swiftly that marble-hard clay was churned into muck by the contending masses of the warriors. I have never seen such mud and of such depth, whose moisture came only from the blood and terror-piss of the men who fought upon it.

When the advance troops, the Spartan rangers, arrived at Thermopylae prior to the battle, a few hours before the main body which was advancing by forced march, they discovered, incredibly, two parties of spa-goers, one from Tiryns, the other from Halkyon, thirty in all, men and women, each in their separate precincts, in various states of undress. These pilgrims were startled, to say the least, by the sudden appearance in their midst of the scarlet-clad armoured Skiritai, all picked men under thirty, chosen for speed of foot as well as prowess in mountain fighting. The rangers cleared the bathers and their attendant perfume vendors, masseurs, fig-cake and bread sellers, bath and oil girls, strigil boys and so forth (who had ample intelligence of the Persian advance but had thought that the recent down-valley storm had rendered the northern approaches temporarily impassable). The rangers confiscated all food, soaps, linens and medical accoutrements and in particular the spa tents, which later appeared so grimly incongruous, billowing festively above the carnage. The rangers re-erected these shelters at the rear, in the Spartan camp beside the Middle Gate, intending them for use by Leonidas and his royal guard.

The Spartan king, when he arrived, refused to avail himself of this shelter, deeming it unseemly. The Spartiate heavy infantry likewise rejected these amenities. The tents fell, in one of the ironies to which those familiar with war are accustomed, to the use of the Spartan helots, Thespian, Phokian and Opountian Lokrian slaves and other attendants of the battle train who suffered wounds in the arrow and missile barrages. These individuals, too, after the second day refused to accept shelter. The brightly coloured spa tents of Egyptian linen, now in tatters, came as His Majesty saw to protect only the beasts of transport, the mules and asses supporting the commissariat, who became terrorized by the sights and smells of the battle and could not be held by their teamsters. In the end the tents were torn to rags to bind the wounds of the Spartiates and their allies.

When I say Spartiates, I mean the formal term in Greek, Spartiatai, which refers to Lakedaemonians of the superior class, full Spartans – the homoioi – Peers or Equals. None of the class called Gentleman-Rankers or of the perioikoi, the secondary Spartans of less than full citizenship, or those enlisted from the surrounding Lakedaemonian towns, fought at the Hot Gates, though towards the end, when the surviving Spartiates became so few that they could no longer form a fighting front, a certain ‘leavening element’, as Dienekes expressed it, of freed slaves, armour bearers and battle squires was permitted to fill the vacated spaces.

His Majesty may nonetheless take pride in knowing that his forces defeated the flower of Hellas, the cream of her finest and most valiant fighting men.

As for my own position within the battle train, the explanation may require a certain digression, with which I hope His Majesty will be patient.

I was captured at the age of twelve (or, more accurately, surrendered) as a heliokekaumenos, a Spartan term of derision which means literally ‘scorched by the sun’. It referred to a type of nearly feral youth, burned black as Ethiopians by their exposure to the elements, with which the mountains abounded in those days preceding and following the first Persian War. I was cast originally among the Spartan helots, the serf class that the Lakedaemonians had created from the inhabitants of Messenia and Helos after they in centuries past had conquered and enslaved them. These husbandmen, however, rejected me because of certain physical impairments which rendered me useless for field labour. Also the helots hated and mistrusted any foreigner among them who might prove an informer. I lived a dog’s life for most of a year before fate, luck or a god’s hand delivered me into the service of Alexandros, a Spartan youth and protégé of Dienekes. This saved my life. I was recognized at least ironically as a freeborn and, evincing such qualities of a wild beast as the Lakedaemonians found admirable, was elevated to the status of parastates pais, a sort of sparring partner for the youths enrolled in the agoge, the notorious and pitiless thirteen-year training regimen which turned boys into Spartan warriors.

Every heavy infantryman of the Spartiate class travels to war attended by at least one helot. Enomotarchai, the platoon leaders, take two. This latter was Dienekes’ station. It is not uncommon for an officer of his rank to select as his primary attendant, his battle squire, a freeborn foreigner or even a young mothax, a non-citizen or bastard Spartan still in agoge training. It was my fortune, for good or ill, to be chosen by my master for this post. I supervised the care and transport of his armour, maintained his kit, prepared his food and sleeping site, bound his wounds and in general performed every task necessary to leave him free to train and fight.

My childhood home, before fate set me upon the road which found its end at the Hot Gates, was originally in Astakos in Akarnania, north of the Peloponnese, where the mountains look west over the sea towards Kephallinia and, beyond the horizon, to Sikelia and Italia.

The island of Ithaka, home of Odysseus of lore, lay within sight across the straits, though I myself was never privileged to touch the hero’s sacred soil, as a boy or later. I was due to make the crossing, a treat from my aunt and uncle, on the occasion of my tenth birthday. But our city fell first, the males of my clan were slaughtered and females sold into slavery, our ancestral land taken, and I cast out, alone save my cousin Diomache, without family or home, three days before the start of my tenth year to heaven, as the poet says.

THREE

WE HAD A SLAVE ON MY FATHER’S FARM WHEN I WAS a boy, a man named Bruxieus, though I hesitate to use the word ‘slave’, because my father was more in Bruxieus’ power than the other way round. We all were, particularly my mother. As lady of the house she refused to make the most trifling domestic decision – and many whose scope far exceeded that – without first securing Bruxieus’ advice and approval. My father deferred to him on virtually all matters, save politics within the city. I myself was completely under his spell.

Bruxieus was an Elean. He had been captured by the Argives in battle when he was nineteen. They blinded him with fiery pitch, though his knowledge of medicinal salves later restored at least a poor portion of his sight. He bore on his brow the ox-horn slave brand of the Argives. My father acquired him when he was past forty, as compensation for a shipment of hyacinth oil lost at sea.

As nearly as I could tell, Bruxieus knew everything. He could pull a bad tooth without clove or oleander. He could carry fire in his bare hands. And, most vital of all to my boy’s regard, he knew every spell and incantation necessary to ward off bad luck and the evil eye.

Bruxieus’ only weakness as I said was his vision. Beyond ten feet the man was blind as a stump. This was a source of secret, if guilty, pleasure to me because it meant he needed a boy with him at all times to see. I spent weeks never leaving his side, not even to sleep, since he insisted on watching over me, slumbering always on a sheepskin at the foot of my little bed.

In those days it seemed there was a war every summer. I remember the city’s drills each spring when the planting was done. My father’s armour would be brought down from the hearth and Bruxieus would oil each rim and joint, rewarp and reshaft the ‘two spears and two spares’ and replace the cord and leather gripware within the hoplon’s oak and bronze sphere. The drills took place on a broad plain west of the potters’ quarter, just below the city walls. We boys and girls brought sunshades and fig cakes, scrapped over the best viewing positions on the wall and watched our fathers drill below us to the trumpeters’ calls and the beat of the battle drummers.

This year of which I speak, the dispute of note was over a proposal made by that session’s prytaniarch, an estate owner named Onaximandros. He wanted each man to efface the clan or individual crest on his shield and replace it with a uniform alpha, for our city Astakos. He argued that Spartan shields all bore a proud lambda, for their country, Lakedaemon. Fine, came the derisive response, but we’re no Lakedaemonians. Someone told the story of the Spartiate whose shield bore no crest at all, but only a common housefly painted life-size. When his rankmates made sport of him for this, the Spartan declared that in line of battle he would get so close to his enemy that the housefly would look as big as a lion.

Every year the military drills followed the same pattern. For two days enthusiasm reigned. Every man was so relieved to be free of farm or shop chores, and so delighted to be reunited with his comrades (and away from the children and women around the house), that the event took on the flavour of a festival. There were sacrifices morning and evening. The rich smells of spitted meat floated over everything; there were wheaten buns and honey candies, fresh-rolled fig cakes, and bowls of rice and barley grilled in sweet new-pressed sesame oil.

By the third day the militiamen’s blisters started. Forearms and shoulders were rubbed raw by the heavy hoplon shields. The warriors, though most were farmers or grovers and supposedly of stout seasoned limb, had in fact passed the bulk of their agricultural labour in the cool of the counting room and not out behind a plough. They were getting tired of sweating. It was hot under those helmets. By the fourth day the sunshine warriors were presenting excuses in earnest. The farm needed this, the shop needed that, the slaves were robbing them blind, the hands were screwing each other silly. ‘Look at how straight the line advances now, on the practice field,’ Bruxieus would chuckle, squinting past me and the other boys. ‘They won’t step so smartly when heaven starts to rain arrows and javelins. Each man will be edging to the right to get into his rankmate’s shadow.’ Meaning the shelter of the shield of the man on his right. ‘By the time they hit the enemy line, the right wing will be overlapped half a stade and have to be chased back into place by its own cavalry!’

Nonetheless our citizen army (we could put four hundred heavy-armoured hoplites into the field on a full call-up), despite the pot-bellies and wobbly shins, had acquitted itself more than honourably, at least in my short lifetime. That same prytaniarch, Onaximandros, had two fine span of oxen, got from the Kerionians, whose countryside our forces allied with the Argives and Eleuthrians had plundered ruthlessly three years running, burning a hundred farms and killing over seventy men. My uncle Tenagros had a stout mule and a full set of armour got in those seasons. Nearly every man had something.

But back to our militia’s manoeuvres. By the fifth day, the city fathers were thoroughly exhausted, bored and disgusted. Sacrifices to the gods redoubled, in the hope that the immortals’ favour would make up for any lack of polemike techne, skill at arms, or empeiria, experience, on the part of our forces. By now there were huge gaps in the field and we boys had descended upon the site with our own play shields and spears. That was the signal to call it a day. With much grumbling from the zealots and great relief from the main body, the call was issued for the final parade. Whatever allies the city possessed that year (the Argives had sent their strategos autokrater, that great city’s supreme military commander) were marshalled gaily into the reviewing stands, and our reinvigorated citizen-soldiers, knowing their ordeal was nearly over, loaded themselves up with every ounce of armour they possessed and passed in glorious review.

This final event was the greatest excitement of all, with the best food and music, not to mention the raw spring wine, and ended with many a farm cart bearing home in the middle watch of the night sixty-five pounds of bronze armour and a hundred and seventy pounds of loudly snoring warrior.

This morning, which initiated my destiny, came about because of ptarmigan eggs.

Among Bruxieus’ many talents, foremost was his skill with birds. He was a master of the snare. He constructed his traps of the very branches his prey favoured to roost upon. With a pop! so delicate you could hardly hear it, his clever snares would fire, imprisoning their mark by the ‘boot’ as Bruxieus called it, and always gently.

One evening Bruxieus summoned me in secrecy behind the cote. With great drama he lifted his cloak, revealing his latest prize, a wild ptarmigan cock, full of fight and fire. I was beside myself with excitement. We had six tame hens in the coop. A cock meant one thing – eggs! And eggs were a supreme delicacy, worth a boy’s fortune at the city market.

Sure enough, within a week our little banty had become the strutting lord of the walk, and not long thereafter I cradled in my palms a clutch of precious ptarmigan eggs.

We were going to town! To market. I woke my cousin Diomache before the middle watch was over, so eager was I to get to our farm’s stall and put my clutch up for sale. There was a diaulos flute I wanted, a double-piper that Bruxieus had promised to teach me coot and grouse calls on. The proceeds from the eggs would be my bankroll. That double-piper would be my prize.

We set out two hours before dawn, Diomache and I, with two heavy sacks of spring onions and three cheese wheels in cloth loaded on a half-lame female ass named Stumblefoot. Stumblefoot’s foal we had left home tied in the barn; that way we could release Mama in town when we unloaded, and she would make a beeline on her own, straight home to her baby.

This was the first time I had ever been to market without a grown-up and the first with a prize of my own to sell. I was excited, too, by being with Diomache. I was not yet ten; she was thirteen. She seemed a full-grown woman to me, and the prettiest and smartest in all that countryside. I hoped my friends would fall in with us on the road, just to see me on my own beside her.

We had just reached the Akarnanian road when we saw the sun. It was bright flaring yellow, still below the horizon against the purple sky. There was only one problem: it was rising in the north.

‘That’s not the sun,’ Diomache said, stopping abruptly and jerking hard on Stumblefoot’s halter. ‘That’s fire.’

It was my father’s friend Pierion’s farm.

The farm was burning.

‘We’ve got to help them,’ Diomache announced in a voice that brooked no protest, and, clutching my cloth of eggs in one hand, I started after her at a fast trot, hauling the bawling limp-footed ass. How can this happen before autumn, Diomache was calling as we ran, the fields aren’t tinder-dry yet, look at the flames, they shouldn’t be that big.

We saw a second fire. East of Pierion’s. Another farm. We pulled up, Diomache and I, in the middle of the road, and then we heard the horses.

The ground beneath our bare feet began to rumble as if from an earthquake. We saw the flare of torches. Cavalry. A full platoon. Thirty-six horses were thundering towards us. We saw armour and crested helmets. I started running towards them, waving in relief. What luck! They would help us! With thirty-six men, we’d have the fires out in—

Diomache yanked me back hard. ‘Those aren’t our men.’

They came past at a near gallop, looking huge and dark and ferocious. Their shields had been blackened, soot smeared on the blazes and stockings of their horses, their bronze greaves caked with dark mud. In the torchlight I saw the white beneath the soot on their shields. Argives. Our allies. Three riders reined in before us; Stumblefoot bawled in terror and stamped to break; Diomache held the halter fast.

‘What you got there, girlie?’ the burliest of the horsemen demanded, wheeling his lathered, mud-matted mount before the onion sacks and the cheeses. He was a wall of a man, like Ajax, with an open-faced Boeotian helmet and white grease under his eyes for vision in the dark. Night raiders. He leaned from his saddle and made a lunging swipe for Stumblefoot. Diomache kicked the man’s mount, hard in the belly; the beast bawled and spooked.

‘You’re burning our farms, you traitorous bastards!’

Diomache slung Stumblefoot’s halter free and slapped the fear-stricken ass with all her strength. The beast ran like hell and so did we.

I have sprinted in battle, racing under arrow and javelin fire with sixty pounds of armour on my back, and countless times in training have I been driven up steep broken faces at a dead run. Yet never have my heart and lungs laboured with such desperate necessity as they did that terror-filled morning. We left the road at once, fearing more cavalry, and bolted straight across country, streaking for home. We could see other farms burning now. ‘We’ve got to run faster!’ Diomache barked back at me. We had come beyond two miles, nearly three, on our trek towards town, and now had to retrace that distance and more across stony, overgrown hillsides. Brambles tore at us, rocks slashed our bare feet, our hearts seemed like they must burst within our breasts. Dashing across a field, I saw a sight that chilled my blood. Pigs. Three sows and their litters were scurrying in single file across the field towards the woods. They didn’t run, it wasn’t a panic, just an extremely brisk, well-disciplined fast march. I thought: those porkers will survive this day, while Diomache and I will not.

We saw more cavalry. Another platoon and another, Aetolians of Pleuron and Kalydon. This was worse; it meant the city had been betrayed not just by one ally but by a coalition. I called to Diomache to stop; my heart was about to explode from exertion. ‘I’ll leave you, you little shit!’ She hauled me forward. Suddenly from the woods burst a man. My uncle Tenagros, Diomache’s father. He was in a nightshirt only, clutching a single eight-foot spear. When he saw Diomache, he dropped the weapon and ran to embrace her. They clung to each other, gasping. But this only struck more terror into me. ‘Where’s Mother?’ I could hear Diomache demanding. Tenagros’ eyes were wild with grief. ‘Where’s my mother?’ I shouted. ‘Is my father with you?’

‘Dead. All dead.’

‘How do you know? Did you see them?’

‘I saw them and you don’t want to.’

Tenagros retrieved his spear from the dirt. He was breathless, weeping; he had soiled himself; there was liquid shit on the inside of his thighs. He had always been my favourite uncle; now I hated him with a murderous passion. ‘You ran!’ I accused him with a boy’s heartlessness. ‘You showed your heels, you coward!’

Tenagros turned on me with fury. ‘Get to the city! Get behind the walls!’

‘What about Bruxieus? Is he alive?’

Tenagros slapped me so hard he bowled me right off my feet. ‘Stupid boy. You care more about a blind slave than your own mother and father.’

Diomache hauled me up. I saw in her eyes the same rage and despair. Tenagros saw it too.

‘What’s that in your hands?’ he barked at me.

I looked down. There were my ptarmigan eggs, still cradled in the rag in my palms.

Tenagros’ calloused fist smashed down on mine, shattering the fragile shells into goo at my feet.

‘Get into town, you insolent brats! Get behind the walls!’

FOUR

HIS MAJESTY HAS PRESIDED OVER THE SACK OF numberless cities and has no need to hear recounted the details of the week that followed. I will append the observation only, from the horror-benumbed apprehension of a boy shorn at one blow of mother and father, family, clan, tribe and city, that this was the first time my eyes had beheld those sights which experience teaches are common to all battles and all slaughters.

This I learned then: there is always fire.

An acrid haze hangs in the air night and day, and sulphurous smoke chokes the nostrils. The sun is the colour of ash, and black stones litter the road, smoking. Everywhere one looks, some object is afire. Timber, flesh, the earth itself. Even water burns. The pitilessness of flame reinforces the sensation of the gods’ anger, of fate, retribution, deeds done and hell to pay.

All is the obverse of what it had been.

Things are fallen which had stood upright. Things are free which should be bound, and bound which should be free. Things which had been hoarded in secret now blow and tumble in the open, and those who had hoarded them watch with dull eyes and let them go.

Boys have become men and men boys. Slaves now stand free and freemen slaves. Childhood has fled. The knowledge of my mother and father’s slaughter struck me less with grief for them or fear for myself than with the imperative to assume at once their station. Where had I been on the morn of their murder? I had failed them, trotting off on my boyish errand. Why had I not foreseen their peril? Why was I not standing at my father’s shoulder, armed and possessed of a man’s strength, to defend our hearth or die honourably before it, as he and my mother had?

Bodies lay in the road. Mostly men, but women and children too, with the same dark blot of fluid sinking into the pitiless dirt. The living trod past them, grief-riven. Everyone was filthy. Many had no shoes. All were fleeing the slave columns and the roundup which would be starting soon. Women carried infants, some of them already dead, while other dazed figures glided past like shades, bearing away some pitifully useless possession, a lamp or a volume of verse. In peacetime the wives of the city walked abroad with necklaces, anklets, rings; now one saw none, or it was secreted somewhere to pay a ferryman’s toll or purchase a heel of stale bread. We encountered people we knew and didn’t recognize them. They didn’t recognize us. Numb reunions were held along roadsides or in copses, and news was traded of the dead and the soon to be dead.

Most piteous of all were the animals. I saw a dog on fire that first morning and ran to snuff his smoking fur with my cloak. He fled, of course; I couldn’t catch him, and Diomache snatched me back with a curse for my foolishness. That dog was the first of many. Horses hamstrung by sword blades, lying on their flanks with their eyes pools of numb horror. Mules with entrails spilling; oxen with javelins in their sides, lowing pitifully yet too terrified to let anyone near to help. These were the most heartbreaking: the poor dumb beasts whose torment was made more pitiful by their lack of faculty to understand it.

Feast day had come for crows and ravens. They went for the eyes first. They peck a man’s asshole out, though God only knows why. People chased them off at first, rushing indignantly at the blandly feeding scavengers, who would retreat as far only as necessity dictated, then hop back to the banquet when the coast was clear. Piety demanded that we bury our fallen countrymen, but fear of enemy cavalry pushed us on. Sometimes bodies would be dragged into a ditch and a few pitiful handfuls of dirt cast over them, accompanied by a miserable prayer. The crows got so fat they could barely fly a foot off the ground.

We did not go into the city, Diomache and I.

We had been betrayed from within, she instructed me, speaking slowly as one would to a simpleton, to make sure I understood. Sold out by our own citizens, some faction seeking power, then they themselves had been double-crossed by the Argives. Astakos was a port, a poor one, but a western harbour nonetheless, which Argos had long coveted. Now she had it.