When the women descried the allied column approaching, they vacated the road in terror, scrambling up the hillsides, clutching their infants and spilling possessions as they fled. There came always that moment when it broke upon these dames that the advancing warriors were their own countrymen. Then the alteration which overtook their hearts bordered upon the ecstatic. The women skittered back down the hardscrabble slopes, pressing tight about the column, some numb with wonder, others with tears coursing down their road-begrimed faces. Grandmothers crowded forward to kiss the young men's hands; farm matrons threw their arms about the necks of the warriors, embracing them in moments that were simultaneously poignant and preposterous. Are you Spartans? they inquired of the sun-blackened infantrymen, the Tegeates and Mycenaeans and Corinthians, Thebans, Philiasians and Arkadians, and many of these lied and said they were.

When the women heard that Leonidas in person led the column, many refused to believe it, so accustomed had they become to betrayal and abandonment. When the Spartan king was pointed out to them and they saw the corps of Knights about him and at last believed, many could not bear the relief. They buried their faces in their hands and sank upon the roadside, overcome.

As the allies beheld this scene repeated, eight, ten, a dozen times a day, a grim urgency took possession of their hearts. All haste must be made; the defenders must at all costs reach and fortify the pass before the arrival of the enemy. Unordered, each man lengthened stride. The pace of the column soon outstripped the capacity of the train to keep up. The waggons and pack asses were simply left behind, to catch up as best they could, their necessaries transferred to the marching men's backs. For myself, I had stripped shoeless and rolled my cloak into a shoulder pad; my master's shield I bore in its hide case, along with his greaves and breastplate weighing something over sixty-five pounds, plus both our bedding and field kit, my own weapons, three quivers of ironheads wrapped in oiled goatskin and sundry other necessaries and indispensables: fishhooks and catgut; bags of medicinal herbs, hellebore and foxglove, euphorbia and sorrel and marjoram and pine resin; arterial straps, bindings for the hand, compresses of linen, the bronze dogs to heat and jam into puncture wounds to cauterize the flesh, irons to do the same for surface lacerations; soap, footpads, moleskins, sewing kit; then the cooking gear, a spit, a pot, a handmill, flint and firesticks; grit-and-oil for polishing bronze, oilcloth fly for rain, the combination pick and shovel called from its shape a hyssax, the soldier's crude term for the female orifice. This in addition to rations: unmilled barley, onions and cheese, garlic, figs, smoked goat meat; plus money, charms, talismans.

My master himself bore the spare shield chassis with double bronze facings, both our shoes and strapping, rivets and instrument kit, his leather corselet, two ash and two cornelwood spears with spare ironheads, helmet, and three xiphe, one on his hip and the other two lashed to the fortypound rucksack stuffed with more rations and unmilled meal, two skins of wine and one of water, plus the goodie bag of sweetcakes prepared by Arete and his daughters, double-wrapped in oiled linen to keep the onion stink of the rucksack from invading it. All up and down the column, squire and man humped loads of two hundred to two hundred and twenty pounds between them.

The column had acquired a nonrostered volunteer. This was a roan-colored hunting bitch named Styx who belonged to Pereinthos, a Skirite ranger who was one of Leonidas' king's selections.

The dog had followed its master down to Sparta from the hills and now, having no home to return to, continued her attendance upon him. For an hour at a crack she would patrol the length of the column, all business, memorizing by scent the position of each member of the march, then returning to her Skirite master, who had now been nicknamed Hound, there to resume her tireless trot at his heel. There was no doubt that in the bitch's mind, all these men belonged to her. She was herding us, Dienekes observed, and doing a hell of a job.

With each passing mile, the countryside grew thinner. Everyone was gone. At last in the nation of the Phokians, nearing the Gates, the column entered country utterly denuded and abandoned. Leonidas dispatched runners into the mountain fastnesses to which the army of the locals had withdrawn, informing them in the name of the Hellenic Congress that the allies stood indeed upon the site and that it was their intention to defend the Phokians' and Lokrians' country whether these themselves showed their faces or not. The king's message was not inscribed upon the customary military dispatch roll, but scribbled on that kind of linen wrapper used to invite family and friends to a dance. The final sentence read: Come as you are.

The allies themselves reached the village of Alpenoi that afternoon, the sixth after the march-out from Lakedaemon, and Thermopylae itself half an hour later. Unlike the countryside, the battlefield, or what would become the battlefield, stood far from deserted. A number of denizens of Alpenoi and Anthela, the north-end village that fronts the stream called Phoenix, had erected makeshift commercial ventures. Several had barley and wheat bread baking. One fellow had set up a grogshop. A pair of enterprising trollops had even established a two-woman brothel in one of the abandoned bathhouses. This became known at once as the Sanctuary of Aphrodite Fallen, or the two-holer, depending upon who was seeking directions and who proffering them.

The Persians, the rangers reported, had not yet reached Trachis either by land or sea. The plain to the north lay yet unpopulated by the enemy camp. The fleet of the Empire, it was reported, had put out from Therma in Macedonia either yesterday or the day before. Their thousand warships were even now traversing the Magnesia coast, the advance elements expected to reach the landing beaches at Aphetae, eight miles north, within twenty-four hours. The land forces of the enemy had departed Therma ten days earlier; their columns were advancing, so fugitives from the north reported, via the coastal and inland routes, cutting through forests as they came. Their rangers were anticipated at the same time as the fleet.

Now Leonidas emerged to the fore.

Before the allied camps were even staked out, the king dispatched raiding parties into the country of Trachis, immediately north of the Gates. These were to torch every stalk of grain and capture or drive off every piece of livestock, down to hedgehogs and barn cats, which might make a meal for the enemy.

In the wake of these raiders, reconnaissance parties were sent out, surveyors and engineers from each allied detachment, with orders to proceed as far north as the landing beaches likely to be appropriated by the Persians. These men were to map the area, as best they could in the gathering darkness, concentrating upon the roads and trails available to the Persian in his advance to the Narrows. Although the allied force possessed no cavalry, Leonidas made certain to include skilled horsemen in this party; though afoot, they could best assess how enemy cavalry might operate. Could Xerxes get horsemen up the trail? How many? How fast? How could the allies best counter this?

Further the reconnaissance parties were to apprehend and detain any locals whose topographical knowledge could be of assistance to the allies. Leonidas wanted yard-by-yard intelligence of the immediate northern approaches and, most crucial recalling Tempe, an iron-clad assessment of the mountain defiles south and west, seeking any undiscovered track by which the Greek position could be outflanked and enveloped.

At this point a prodigy occurred which nearly broke the allies' will before they had even unshouldered their kits. An infantryman of the Thebans trod accidentally into a nest of baby snakes and received upon the bare ankle the full poison of half a dozen infant serpents, whose venom, all hunters know, is more to be feared than a full grown's because the young ones have not yet learned how to deal it out in doses, but instead inject it into the flesh in full measure. The infantryman died within the hour amid horrible sufferings, despite being bled white by the surgeons.