I saw Alpheus take on a Persian chariot single-handedly, slaying general, henchman and both flank guardsmen. When he fell, shot through the throat by a Persian arrow, Dienekes dragged him out. He got up, still fighting. I saw Polynikes and Derkylides hauling Leonidas' corpse, each with a weaponless hand upon the shoulders of the king's shattered corselet, striking at the foe with their shields as they drew back. The Spartans re-formed and rushed, fell back and broke, then reformed again. I killed a man of the Egyptians with the butt-spike of my shivered spear as he drove his own into the wall of my guts, then an instant later, falling under the blow of an axe, clawed free over a Spartan corpse, only to recognize, beneath its hacked-open helmet, the shattered face of Alpheus.

Suicide hauled me from the fray. At last the Ten Thousand Immortals could be seen, advancing in line of battle to complete their envelopment. What remained of the Spartans and Thespians fell rearward from the plain, to the Narrows, pouring through the sallyports of the Wall toward the final hillock.

The allies were so few now, and their weapons so spent and broken, that the Persians made bold to attack with cavalry, as they would in a rout. Suicide fell. His right foot had been chopped off.

Put me on your back! he commanded. I knew without more words what he meant. I could hear arrows and even javelins thrumming into his yet-living flesh, shielding me as I bore him.

I saw Dienekes yet alive, slinging away one shattered xiphos and clawing through the dirt for another. Polynikes churned past me, carrying Telamonias hobbled beside him. Half the runner's face had been sheared off; blood gushed in sheets from the opened bone of his cheek. The dump! he was calling, meaning that magazine of weapons which Leoni-das had ordered placed in reserve behind the Wall. I felt the tissue of my belly tear and the intestines begin to spill.

Suicide hung life-spent upon my back. I turned rearward toward the Narrows. Persian and Median archers in their thousands hailed bronzeheads down upon the retreating Spartans and Thespians. Those who reached the dump were shredded like pennants in a gale.

The defenders staggered toward the knoll upon which the last stack of weapons had been cached.

Mo more than sixty remained; Derkylides, astonishingly unwounded, rallied the survivors into a circular front. I found a strap and cinched my guts in. I was struck, for just a moment, with the impossible beauty of the day. For once no haze obscured the chan-nel; one could make out individual stones upon the hills across the strait and track the game trails up the slopes, turn by turn.

I saw Dienekes reel beneath the blow of an axe, but had not myself the strength to rally to him.

Medes and Persians, Bactrians and Sacae, were not merely pouring over the Wall but dismantling it with a frenzy. I could see horses beyond. The officers of the foe no longer required whips to drive their men forward. Over the broken stones of the Wall thundered the horsemen of His Majesty's cavalry, followed by the bucking chariots of his generals.

The Immortals marshaled round about the hillock now, pouring bowfire point-blank into the Spartans and Thespians crouched beneath the slender shelter of their shattered and staved-in shields. Derkylides led the rush upon them. I saw him fall, and Dienekes, fighting beside him.

Neither had shields, nor for all that could be seen, weapons of any kind. They went down not like heroes of Homer crashing clamorously within the carapaces of their armor, but like commanders completing their last and dirtiest job.

The enemy stood, invincible in the might of their missile fire, but somehow the Spartans reached them. They fought without shields, with only swords and then bare hands and teeth. Polynikes went after an officer. The runner still had his legs. So swiftly did he cross the space at the base of the hillock that his hands found the foe's throat even as a storm of Persian steel tore his back apart.

The last few dozen upon the hillock, rallied now by Dithyrambos, both of whose arms had been shredded by enemy fire and hung now useless at his sides, pincushioned with bolts, sought to form a front for a final rush. Chariots and Persian horsemen stampeded pell-mell into the Spartans. A battle waggon, afire, rolled over both my legs. Before the defenders, completely encircling the hillock, the Immortals had formed now in bowmen's ranks. Their bolts thundered upon the last unarmed and shattered warriors. From their rear, more archers hurled volleys over the heads of their comrades to rain upon the last survivors among the Hellenes. Backs and bellies bristled with the fletched spines of arrow butts; shot-to-pieces men sprawled in rag piles of bronze and scarlet.

The ear could hear His Majesty bawling orders, so near at hand ranged he upon his chariot. Was he calling in his foreign tongue for his men to cease fire, to capture the final defenders alive?

Were those to whom he cried the marines of Egypt, under their captain, Ptammitechus, who spurned their monarch's order and rushed in to gift what Spartans and Thespians they could reach with the final boon of death? It was impossible to see or hear within the tumult. The marines parted toward the flanks. The fury of the Persian archers redoubled as they sought with the numberless shafts of their fusillades to extinguish at last the stubborn foe who had made them pay so dearly for this mean measure of dirt, As when a hailstorm descends unseasonably from the mountains and hurls from the sky its icy pellets upon the husbandman's newly sprouted crop, so did the bolts of the Persians in their myriads thunder down upon the Spartans and Thespians.

Now the farmer assumes his anxious station in the doorway, hearing the deluge upon the tiles of the roof, watching its bullets of ice clatter and rebound upon the stones of the walk. How fare the sprouts of spring barley? One here and there survives, as if by miracle, and holds yet its head aloft. But the planter knows this state of clemency cannot endure. He turns his face away, in obedience to the laws of God, while without, beneath the storm, the final shaft breaks and falls, overwhelmed by the insuperable onslaught of heaven.

Chapter Thirty Six

Such was the end of Leonidas and the defenders of the pass at Thermopylae, as related by the Greek Xeones and compiled in transcription by His Majesty's historian Gobartes the son of Artabazos and completed the fourth day of Arahsamnu, Year Five of His Majesty's Accession.

This date, in the bitter iron} of God Ahura Mazda, was the same upon which the naval forces of the Persian Empire suffered the calamitous defeat at the hands of the Hellenic fleet, in the Straits of Solamis, off Athens, that catastrophe which sent to their deaths so many valiant sons of the East and, by its consequences for the supply and support of the army, doomed the entire campaign to disaster.

That oracle of Apollo delivered earlier to the Athenians, which declared, The wooden wall alone shall not fail you, had revealed its fateful truth, the timbered stronghold manifesting itself not as that ancient palisade of the Athenian Acropolis so speedily overrun by His Majesty's forces, but as a wail of ships' hulls and the sailors and marines of Hellas who manned them so superbly, dealing the death blow to His Majesty's ambitions of conquest.

The magnitude of the calamity effaced all consideration of thecaptive Xeones and his tale. Care of the man himself was forsaken amid the chaos of defeat, as every physician and tender of the Royal Surgeon's staff made haste to the shore opposite Salamis, there to minister to the myriad wounded of the imperial armada, washed up amid the charred and splintered wreckage of their vessels of war.

When darkness at last brought surcease from the slaughter, a greater terror seized the Empire's camp. This was of the wrath of His Majesty. So many officers of the court were being put to the sword, or so my notes recall, that the Historian's staff cried quits to the task of recording their names.