I can hear him cracking now. Remember: we're going in for a boxer's round. In and out. Nobody dies. No heroes. Get in, kill all you can, then get out when the trumpets sound.

Behind the Spartans, on the Wall, which had been filled with the third wave of Tegeates and Opountian Lokrians twelve hundred strong, the wail of the Alpine cut the din. Out front, Leonidas raised his spear and tugged his helmet down. You could see Polynikes and the Knights advance to envelop him. The Thespians' round was over. Hats down! Dienekes bellowed. Cheeseplates up!

The Spartans came in frontally, eight deep, at a double interval, allowing the Thespian rearmen to withdraw between their files, man by man, one rank at a time. There was no order to it; the Thespians just dropped from exhaustion; the Lakedaemonian tread rolled over them. When the Spartan promachoi, the forerankers, got within three shields of the front, their spears began plunging at the foe over the allies' shoulders. Many of the Thespians just dropped and let themselves be trampled; their mates pulled them to their feet once the line had passed over them.

Everything Dienekes had said proved true. The Medes' shields were not only too light and too small, but their lack of mass prevented them from gaining purchase against the Hellenes' wide and weighty, bowl-shaped aspides. The enemy's targeteer shields slid off the convex fronts of the Greeks', deflecting up and down, left and right, exposing their bearers' necks and thighs, throats and groins. The Spartans struck overhand with their spears, again and again into the faces and gorges of the enemy. The Medes' armament was that of skirmishers, of lightly armed warriors of the plains, whose role was to strike swiftly, from beyond range of spear thrust, dealing death at a distance. This dense-packed phalanx warfare was hell on them.

And yet they stood. Their valor was breathtaking, beyond reckless to the point of madness. It became sacrifice, pure and simple; the Medes gave up their bodies as if flesh itself were a weapon. In minutes the Spartans, and no doubt the Mycenaeans and Phliasians as well, though I couldn't see them, were beyond exhaustion. Simply from killing. Simply from the arm's thrust of the spear, the shoulder's heave of the shield, the thunder of blood through the veins and the hammering of the heart within the breast. The earth grew, not Uttered with enemy bodies, but piled with them. Stacked with them. Mounded with them.

At the heels of the Spartans, their squires abandoned all thought of inflicting casualties with their own missile weapons, turning to nothing but dragging out trampled corpses of the foe to help their men maintain footing. I saw Demades, Ariston's squire, slit three wounded Medes' throats in fifteen seconds, slinging their carcasses back onto a mound already writhing with groaning men.

Discipline had broken among the Median forerankers; officers' bawled orders could not be heard amid the din, and even if they could, the men were so overwhelmed in the crush they could not respond to them. Still the rank and file had not panicked. In desperation they cast aside bows, lances and shields and simply grappled with bare hands onto the weapons of the Spartans. They clutched at spears, hanging on with both hands and struggling to wrest them from the Spartans' grips. Others of the foe flung themselves bodily onto the Lakedaemonians' shields, clasping the top rim and pulling the bowls of the aspides down, scratching and clawing at the Spartans with fingers and fingernails.

Now the slaughter in the forefront became man-to-man, with only the wildest semblance of rank and formation. The Spartans slew belly-to-belly with the murderously efficient thrust-and-draw of their short xiphos swords. I saw Alexandras, his shield torn from his grip, plunging his xiphos into the face of a Mede whose hands clawed and pounded at Alexandras' groin.

The middle-rankers of the Lakedaemonians surged into this bedlam, spears and shields still intact. But the Medes' capacity for reinforcement seemed limitless; above the fray, one could glimpse the next thousand reinforcements thundering into the Narrows like a flood, with more myriads behind, and yet more after that. Despite the catastrophic magnitude of their casualties, the tide began to flow in the enemy's favor. The weight of their masses alone began to buckle the Spartan line. The only thing that stopped the foe from swamping the Hellenes outright was that they couldn't get enough men through the Narrows quickly enough; that, and the wall of Median bodies that now obstructed the confines like a landslide.

The Spartans fought from behind this wall of flesh as if it were a battlement of stone. The enemy swarmed atop it. Now we in the rear could see them; they became targets. Twice Suicide drilled javelins right over Alexandras' shoulder into Medes lunging at the youth from atop the mound of corpses. Bodies were underfoot everywhere. I mounted atop what I thought was a stone, only to feel it writhe and wriggle beneath me. It was a Mede, alive. He plunged the stub end of a shattered machaera scimitar three inches into my calf; I bellowed in terror and toppled into the tangle of other gore-splattered limbs. The foe came at me with his teeth. He seized my arm as if to tear it from its socket; I punched him in the face with my bow still in my grip. Suddenly a foot planted itself massively upon my back. A battle-axe fell with a grisly swoosh; the enemy's skull split like a melon. What are you looking for down there? a voice bellowed. It was Akanthus, Polynikes' squire, spray-blasted with blood and grinning like a madman.

The enemy flooded over the wall of bodies. By the time I got to my feet I had lost sight of Dienekes; I couldn't tell which platoon was which or where my proper station was. I had no idea how long we had been in the fight. Was it two minutes or twenty? I had two spears, spares, lashed to my back, their iron sheathed in leather so that, should I tumble accidentally, the spearpoints would work no harm to our comrades. Every other squire bore the same burden; they were all as scrambled as I was.

Up front you could hear the Median lancers' shafts snapping as they clashed and shivered against the Spartan bronze.

The Spartans' eight-footers made a different sound than the shorter, lighter lances of the foe. The flood was working against the Lakedaemonians, not from want of valor, but simply in consequence of the overwhelming masses of men which the enemy flung into the teeth of the line. I was frantic to locate Dienekes and deliver my spares. The scene was chaos. I could hear breakdowns right and left and see the rear-rankers of the Spartans buckling as the files before them gave way beneath the weight of the Median onslaught. I had to forget my master and serve where I could.

I dashed to a point where the line was thinnest, only three deep and beginning to swell into the desperate inverse bulge that precedes an out-and-out break. A Spartan fell backward amid the maw of slaughter; I saw a Mede lop the warrior's head clean off with a thunderous slash of a scimitar. The skull toppled, helmet and all, severed from its torso and rolling in the dust, with the marrow gushing and the bone of the spine showing grayish white and ghastly. Helmet and head vanished amid a storm of churning greaves and shod and unshod feet. The murderer loosed a cry of triumph, raising his blade to heaven; half an instant later a crimson-clad warrior buried an eight-footer so deep in the foeman's guts that its killing steel burst free, clear out the man's back.

I saw another Mede pass out in terror. The Spartan couldn't haul the weapon back out, so he broke it right off, planting his foot on the still-living enemy's belly and snapping the ash shaft in two. I had no idea who this hero was, and never did find out.

Spear! I heard him bellow, the hellish eye sockets of his helmet spinning to the rear for relief, for a spare, for anything to call to hand. I tore both eight-footers off my back and thrust them into the unknown warrior's hands. Backward. He seized one and whirled, planting it with both hands into another Mede's throat, butt-spike-first. His shield's gripcord had been severed or snapped from within; the aspis itself had fallen to the dirt. There was no room to retrieve it.