Chapter Thirty Seven
These were the final words spoken by the captive Xeones. The man's voice trailed off; his vital signs ebbed swiftly. Within moments he lay still and cold. His god had used him up and restored him at last to that station to which he yearned most to return, reunited with the corps of his comrades beneath the earth.
Immediately outside the captain Orontes' tent, armored elements of His Majesty's forces were clamorously withdrawing from the city. Orontes ordered the man Xeones' body borne without upon his litter. Chaos reigned. The captain was past due at his post; each succeeding moment heightened the urgency of his departure.
His Majesty will recall the state of anarchy which prevailed upon that morning, Numerous street youths and blackguards, the scum of the Athenian polity, that element of such mean station as not even to merit evacuation but who instead had been marooned by their betters and left to prowl the streets as predators, now made bold to penetrate the margins of His Majesty's camp.
These villains were looting everything they could lay hands upon. As our party emerged onto that now-rubbled boulevard called by the Athenians the Sacred Way, a clutch of these felons chanced to be herded past by subalterns of His Majesty's military police.
To my astonishment the captain Orontes hailed these officers. He ordered them to release the miscreants to his charge and themselves begone. The malefactors were three in number and of the scurviest disposition imaginable. They drew themselves up before Orontes and the officers of the Immortals, clearly expecting to be executed upon the spot. I was commanded by the captain to translate.
Orontes demanded of these rogues if they were Athenians. Not citizens, they replied, but men of the city. Orontes indicated the coarsecloth wrap which draped the form of the man Xeones.
Do you know what this garment is?
The villains' leader, a youth not yet twenty, responded that it was the scarlet cloak of Lakedaemon, that mantle worn only by a warrior of Sparta. Clearly none of the criminals could summon explanation for the presence of the body of this man, a Hellene, here now in the charge of his Persian enemy.
Orontes interrogated the wretches further. Did they know the location, in the seaport precinct of Phaleron, of that sanctuary known as Persephone of the Veil?
The thugs replied in the affirmative.
To my further astonishment, and that of the officers as well, the captain produced from his purse three gold darics, each a month's pay for an armored infantryman, and held this treasure out to the reprobates.
Take this man's body to that temple and remain with it until the priestesses return from their evacuation. They will know what to do with it.
Here one of the officers of the Immortals broke in to protest. Look at these criminals, sir. They are swine! Place gold in their hands and they'll dump man and litter in the first ditch they come to.
No time remained for debate. Orontes, myself and the officers all must make haste to our stations. The captain held up, for the briefest of intervals, examining the faces of the three scoundrels before him.
Do you love your country? he demanded.
The villains' expressions of defiance answered for them.
Orontes indicated the form upon the litter.
This man, with his life, has preserved it. Bear him with honor. There we left him, the corpse of the Spartan Xeones, and in a moment were swept ourselves into the irresistible current of decampment and retreat.
Chapter Thirty Eight
There remain to be appended wo final postscripts regarding the man and the manuscript which will at last round this tale into completion.
As the captain Orontes had predicted, His Majesty took ship for Asia, leading in Greece under command of Mardonius the elite corps of the army, some 300,000 including Orontes himself and the Ten Thousand Immortals, with orders to winter in Thessaly and resume the conflict when campaigning weather returned in the spring. Come that season, so vowed the general Mardonius, the irresistible might of His Majesty's army would once and for ail deliver into subjection the whole of Hellas. I myself remained, in the capacity of historian, upon station with this corps.
At last in the spring His Majesty's land forces faced the Hellenes in battle upon that plain adjacent to the Greek city of Pla-taea, a day's march northwest of Athens.
Across from the 300,000 of Persia, Media, Bactria, India, the Sacae and the Hellenes conscripted under His Majesty's banner stood 100,000 free Greeks, the main force comprised of the full Spartan army-5000 Peers, plus the Lakedaemonian per-ioikoi, armed squires and helots to a total of 75,000-flanked by the hoplite militia of their Peloponnesian allies, the Tegeates. The army's strength was completed by lesser-numbered contingents from a dozen other Greek states, foremost among whom stood the Athenians, to the number of 8000, upon the left.
One need not recount the particulars of that calamitous defeat, so grimly familiar are they to His Majesty, nor the details of the appalling losses to famine and disease of the flower of the Empire upon the long retreat to Asia. It ma? suffice to note, from the perspective of an eyewitness, that everything the man Xeones had forecast proved true. Our warriors beheld again that line of lambdas upon the interleaved shields of Lakedaemon, not this time in breadth of fifty or sixty as in the confines of the Hot Gates, but ten thousand across and eight deep, as Xeones had described them, an invincible tide of bronze and scarlet. The courage of the men of Persia once again proved no match for the valor and magnificent discipline of these warriors of Lakedaemon fighting to preserve their nation's freedom. It is my belief that no force under heaven, however numerous, could have withstood their onslaught upon that day.
In the hot-blood aftermath of the slaughter, the historian's station within the Persian palisade was overrun by two battalions of armed helots. These, under orders of the Spartan commander in chief, Pausanias, to take no prisoners, began butchering without quarter every man of Asia they could la? steel upon. In this exigency I thrust myself forward and began crying out in Greek, imploring the conquerors for mere? for our men.
Such, however, stood the Greeks' fear of the multitudes of the East, even in disarm? and defeat, that none heeded or gave pause. Hands were laid upon my own person and my throat drawn back beneath the blade. Inspired perhaps by God Ahura Mazda, or in the instance by terror alone, I found my voice crying out from memory the names of those Spartans of whom the man Xeones had spoken. Leonidas. Dienekes. Alexandras. Polynikes. Rooster. At once the helot warriors drew up their swords. All slaughter ceased.
Spartiate officers appeared and restored order to the mob of their armored serfs. I was hauled forward, hands bound, and dumped upon the earth before one of the Spartans, a magnificentlookmg warrior, his flesh yet steaming with the gore and tissue of conquest. The helots had informed him of the names I had cried out. The warrior stood over my kneeling form, regarding me gravely.
Do you know who I am? he demanded. I replied that I did not.
I am Dekton, son of Idotychides. It was my name you called when you cried 'Rooster.' '
Scruple compels me here to state that what spare physical description the captive Xeones had supplied of this man failed in all ways to do him justice. The warrior who stood above me was a splendid specimen in the prime of youth and vigor, six feet and more in stature, possessed of a comeliness of person and nobility of bearing that belied utterly the mean birth and station from which, it was clear, he had in the interval arisen.