Into this the Spartans advanced. They were told later by the allies observing from the Wall that at this instant, as the spears of the Spartans' front ranks lowered in unison from the vertical plane of advance into the leveled position of attack and the serried phalanx lengthened stride to assault the foe at the double; at this moment, His Majesty, looking on, had leapt to his feet in terror for his army.

The Spartans knew how to attack wicker. They had practiced against it beneath the oaks on the field of Otona, in the countless repetitions when we squires and helots took station with practice shields, planted our heels and braced with all our strength, awaiting the massed shock of their assault. The Spartans knew the spear was worthless against the interlat-ticed staves; its shaft penetrated the wicker only to become imprisoned and impossible to extract. Likewise the thrust or slash of the xiphos, which caromed off as if striking iron. The enemy line must be struck, shock troop style, and overwhelmed, bowled over; it had to be hit so hard and with such concentrated force that its front-rankers caved and toppled, one rank backward upon another, like plateware in a cabinet when the earth quakes.

This is precisely what happened. The Median archers were drawn up not in a massed square front-to-back with each warrior reinforcing his comrades against the shock of assault, but honeycombed in alternating fronts, each rank at the shoulder of the one before it, so that the bowmen in the second could fire in the gaps left by the first, and on in this fashion rearward throughout the formation.

Moreover the enemy ranks were not stacked with the massed compaction of the Spartan phalanx.

There was a void, an interval between ranks dictated by the physical demands of the bow. The result of this was precisely what the Lakedaemonians expected: the forerank of the enemy collapsed immediately as the first shock hit it; the body-length shields seemed to implode rearward, their anchoring spikes rooted slinging from the earth like tent pins in a gale. The forerank archers were literally bowled off their feet, their wall-like shields caving in upon them like fortress redoubts under the assault of the ram. The Spartan advance ran right over them, and the second rank, and the third. The mob of enemy mid-rankers, urged on by their officers, sought desperately to dig in and hold. Closed breast-to-breast with the Spartan shock troops, the foe's bows were useless. They flung them aside, fighting with their belt scimitars. I saw an entire front of them, shieldless, slashing wildly with a blade in each hand. The valor of individual Medes was beyond question, but their light hacking blades were harmless as toys; against the massed wall of Spartan armor, they might as well have been defending themselves with reeds or fennel stalks.

We learned that evening, from Hellenic deserters who had fled in the confusion, that the foe's rearmost ranks, thirty and forty back from the front, had been pressed rearward so resistlessly by the collapse of the men up front that they began tumbling off the Trachinian track into the sea.

Pande-monium had apparently-reigned along a section several hundred yards long, beyond the Narrows, where the trail ran flush against the mountain wall, with the gulf yawning eighty feet below. Over this brink, the deserters reported, hapless lancers and archers had toppled by the score, clinging to the men before them and pulling these down with them to their deaths. His Majesty, we heard, was forced to witness this, as his vantage lay almost directly above the site.

This was the second moment, so the observers reported, when His Majesty sprung to his feet in dread for the fate of his warriors.

The ground immediately to the rear of the Spartan ad' vance, as expected, was littered with the trampled forms of the enemy dead and wounded. But there was a new wrinkle. The Medes had been overrun with such speed and force that numbers of them, far from inconsiderable, had survived intact. These now rose and attempted to rally, only to find themselves assaulted almost at once by the massed ranks of the allied reserves who were already advancing in formation to reinforce and relieve the Spartans. A second slaughter now ensued, as the Tegeates and Opountian Lokrians fell upon this yet-unreaped harvest. Tegea lies immediately adjacent to the territory of Lakedaemon. For centuries the Spartans and Tegeates had battled over the border plains before, in the previous three generations, becoming fast allies and comrades. Of all the Peloponnesians save the Spartans, the warriors of Tegea are the fiercest and most skilled. As for the Lokrians of Opus, this was their country they were fighting for; their homes and temples, fields and sanctuaries, lay within an hour's march of the Hot Gates. Quarter, they knew, stood not within the invader's lexicon; neither would it be found in theirs.

I was dragging a wounded Knight, Polynikes' friend Doreion, to the safety of the field's shoulder when my foot slipped in an ankle-deep stream. Twice I tried to regain balance and twice fell. I was cursing the earth. What perverse spring had suddenly burst forth from the mountainside when none had shown itself in this place before? I looked down. A river of blood covered both feet, draining across a gouge in the dirt like the gutter of an abattoir.

The Medes had cracked. The Tegeates and Opountian Lokrians surged in reinforcement through the ranks of the spent Spartans, pressing the assault upon the reeling enemy. It was the allies' turn now. Put the steel to 'em, boys! one among the Spartans cried as the wave of allied ranks advanced ten deep from the rear and both flanks and closed into a massed phalanx before the warriors of Sparta, who at last drew up, limbs quaking with fatigue, and collapsed against one another and upon the earth.

At last I found my master. He was on one knee, shattered with exhaustion, clinging with both fists to his shivered blade-bereft spear which was driven butt-spike-first into the earth and from which he hung like a broken marionette upon a stick. The weight of his helmet bore his head groundward; he possessed strength neither to lift it nor to pull it off. Alex-andros collapsed beside him, on all fours with the crown of his helmet, crest-first, mashed with exhaustion into the dirt. His rib cage heaved like a hound's, while spittle, phlegm and blood dripped from the bronze of his cheekpieces in a frothing lather.

Here came the Tegeates and Lokrians, surging past us.

There they went, driving the enemy before them.

For the first interval in what seemed an eternity, the dread of imminent extinction lifted. The Lakedaemonians dropped to the earth where they stood, on knees first, then knees and elbows, then simply sprawling, on sides and on backs, collapsing against one another, sucking breath in gasping labored need. Eyes stared vacantly, as if blind. None could summon strength to speak.

Weapons drooped of their own weight, in fists so cramped that the will could not compel the muscles to release their frozen grasp. Shields toppled to earth, bowl-down and defamed; exhausted men collapsed into them face-first and could not find strength even to turn their faces to the side to breathe.

A fistful of teeth spit from Alexandros' mouth. When he recovered strength sufficient to prise his helmet off, his long hair came out at the roots in wads, a tangled mass of salt sweat and matted blood. His eyes stared, blank as stones. He collapsed like a child, burying his face in my master's lap, weeping the dry tears of those whose shattered substance has no more fluid to spend.

Suicide came up, shot through both shoulders and oblivious with elation. He stood above the collapsed ranks of men, fearless, peering out to where the allies had now closed with the last of the Medes and were hacking them to pieces with such a grisly din that it seemed the slaughter was taking place ten paces away instead of a hundred.