Chapter Thirty Three
The space immediately east of the pavilion stood occupied exclusively by the picketed mounts of His Majesty's personal riding stock and the service tents of their grooms. Through this open-air paddock the raiding party now fled. Linen windbreaks had been erected, dividing the enclosure into squares. It was like racing through the hanging laundry of a city's humble quarter. As Suicide and I overtook our comrades among the wind-numbed mounts, on a dead run and with the blood of terror pounding within our temples, we encountered Rooster at the party's rear, gesturing urgently to us to slow, to stop. Walk.
The party emerged into the open. Armored men advanced toward us by the hundreds. But these, as fortune or a god's hand would have it, had not been summoned to arms in response to the attack upon their King, but stood in fact in total ignorance of it. They were simply rising to the call of reveille, groggy yet and grumbling in the gale-pounded dark, to arm for the morning's resumption of battle. The marines' shouts of alarm from the pavilion were shredded in the teeth of the gale; their foot pursuit lost its way at once among the myriads in the dark.
The flight from the Persian camp became attended, as are so many moments in war, by a sense of reality so dislocated as to border upon, and even surpass, the bizarre. The party made good its escape neither sprinting nor flying, but limping and hobbling. The raiders trudged in the open, making no attempt to conceal themselves from the enemy but in fact approaching and even engaging him in converse. Irony compounded, the party itself helped spread the alarm of attack, helmetless as it was and bloodied, bearing shields from which the lambda of Lakedaemon had been effaced and carrying across its shoulders one desperately wounded, Alexandras, and one already dead, Lachides. For all the world, the group appeared like a squad of overwhelmed pickets. Dienekes speaking in Boeotian Greek, or as near as he could come to the accent, and Suicide in his own Scythian dialect, addressed those officers whose arming men we passed through, spreading the word mutiny and gesturing back, not wildly but wearily, toward the pavilion of His Majesty.
Nobody seemed to give a damn. The great bulk of the army, it was clear, were grudging draftees whose nations had been conscripted into service against their will. These now in the dank and gale-torn dawn sought only to warm their own backsides, fill their bellies and get through the day's fighting with their heads still attached.
The raiding party even received unwitting aid for Alex-andros from a squad of Trachinian cavalrymen, struggling to ignite a fire for their breakfast. These took us for Thebans, the faction of that nation who had gone over to the Persian, whose turn it was that night to provide innerperimeter security. The cavalrymen provided us with light, water and bandages while Suicide, with the hands of experience surer than any battlefield surgeon's, secured the hemorrhaging artery with a copper dog bite. Already he, Alexandros, was deep in shock.
Am I dying? he asked Dienekes in that sad detached tone so like a child's, the voice of one who seems to stand already at his own shoulder.
You'll die when I say you can, Dienekes answered gently.
The blood was coming in surges from Alexandras' severed wrist despite the arterial clamp, sheeting from the hacked-off veins and the hundred vessels and capillaries within the pulpy tissue. With the flat of a xiphos gray-hot from the fire, Suicide cauterized and bound the stump, lashing a tourniquet about the pinion point beneath the biceps. What none was aware of in the dark and the confusion, not even Alexandros himself, was the puncture wound of a lance-point beneath his second rib and the blood pooling internally at the base of his lungs.
Dienekes himself had been wounded in the leg, his bad leg with the shattered ankle, and had lost his own share of blood. He no longer had the strength to carry Alexandros. Polynikes took over, slinging the yet-conscious warrior over his right shoulder, loosening the gripcord of Alexandras' shield to hang it as protection across his back.
Suicide collapsed halfway up the slope before the citadel. He had been shot in the groin, sometime back in the pavilion, and didn't even know it. I took him; Rooster carried Lachides' body. Dienekes' leg was coming unstrung; he needed bearing himself. In the starlight I could see the look of despair in his eyes.
We all felt the dishonor of leaving Doreion's body and Hound's, and even the outlaw's, among the foe. The shame drove the party like a lash, impelling each exhaustion-shattered limb one pace more up the brutal, steepening slope.
We were past the citadel now, skirting the felled wood where the Thessalian cavalry were picketed. These were all awake now and armed, moving out for the day's battle. A few minutes later we reached the grove where earlier we had startled the slumbering deer.
A Doric voice hailed us. It was Telamonias the boxer, the man of our party whom Dienekes had dispatched back to Leonidas with word of the mountain track and the Ten Thousand. He had returned with help. Three Spartan squires and half a dozen Thespians. Our party dropped in exhaustion. We've roped the trail back, Telamonias informed Dienekes. The climbing's not bad.
What about the Persian Immortals? The Ten Thousand.
No sign when we left. But Leonidas is withdrawing the allies. They're all pulling out, everyone but the Spartans.
Polynikes set Alexandras gently down upon the matted grass within the grove. You could still smell the deer. I saw Dienekes feel for Alexandras' breath, then flatten his ear, listening, to the youth's chest. Shut up! he barked at the party. Shut the fuck up!
Dienekes pressed his ear tighter to the flat of Alexandras' sternum. Could he distinguish the sound of his own heart, hammering now in his chest, from that beat which he sought so desperately within the breast of his protege? Long moments passed. At last Dienekes straightened and sat up, his back seeming to bear the weight of every wound and every death across all his years.
He lifted the young man's head, tenderly, with a hand beneath the back of his neck. A cry of such grief as I had never heard tore from my master's breast. His back heaved; his shoulders shuddered. He lifted Alexandras' bloodless form into his embrace and held it, the young man's arms hanging limp as a doll's. Polynikes knelt at my master's side, draped a cloak about his shoulders and held him as he sobbed.
Never in battle or elsewhere had I, nor any of the men there present beneath the oaks, beheld Dienekes loose the reins of self-command with which he maintained so steadfast a hold upon his heart. You could see him summon now every reserve of will to draw himself back to the rigor of a Spartan and an officer. With an expulsion of breath that was not a. sigh but something deeper, like the whistle of death the dai-man makes escaping within the avenue of the throat, he released Alexandras' life-fled form and settled it gently upon the scarlet cloak spread beneath it on the earth. With his right hand he clasped that of the youth who had been his charge and protege since the mom of his birth. You forgot about our hunt, Alexandras. Eos, pallid dawn, bore now her light to the barren heavens without the thicket. Game trails and deer-trodden traces could be discerned. The eye began to make out the wild, torrent-cut slopes so like those of Therai on Taygetos, the oak groves and shaded runs that, it was certain, teemed with deer and boar and even, perhaps, a lion.
We would have had such a grand hunt here next fall.
THIRTT-fOUR The preceding Pages were the last delivered to His Majesty prior to the burning of Athens.
The Army of the Empire stood at that time, two hours prior to sunset, some six weeks after the victory at Thermopylae, drawn up on line within the western walls of the city of Athena. An incendiary brigade of 120,000 men there dressed at a double-arms interval and advanced across the capital, putting all temples and shrines, magistracies and public buildings, gymnasia, houses, factories, schools and warehouses to the torch.