Gates of Fire (41 page)
Authors: Steven Pressfield
The ashes of one other body, that of a warrior of Lakedaemon returned from Athens, were borne by the Aeginetan vessel. The captain could provide no intelligence as to the identity of these remains. My heart, however,
leapt at the possibility that they might be those of our narrator. I pressed the sea captain for further intelligence.
At the Hot Gates themselves, this officer declared, these final bodies and the urn of ashes were interred in the burial mound of the Lakedaemonian precinct, sited upon a knoll directly above the sea. Scrupulous interrogation of the captain as to the topography of the site permits me to conclude with near certainty that this hillock is the same whereupon the final defenders perished.
No athletic games were celebrated in memoriam, but only a simple solemn service sung in thanksgiving to Zeus Savior, Apollo, Eros and the Muses. It was all over, the ship's master stated, in less than an hour.
The captain's preoccupations upon the site were understandably more for the tide and the security of his vessel than with the memorial events transpiring. One instance, however, struck him, he said, as singular to the point of recollection. A woman among the Spartan party had held herself discrete from the others and chose to linger, solitary, upon the site after her sisters had reassembled in preparation to depart. In fact this lady tarried so late that the captain was compelled to dispatch one of his seamen to summon her away.
I inquired earnestly after the name of this woman. The captain, not surprisingly, had neither inquired nor been informed. I pressed the question, seeking any peculiarities of dress or person which might assist in mounting a supposition as to her identity. The captain insisted that there was nothing.
“What about her face?” I persisted. “Was she young or old? Of what age or appearance?”
“I cannot say,” the man replied.
“Why not?”
“Her face was hidden,” the ship's master declared. “All but her eyes obscured by a veil.”
        Â
I
inquired further as to the monuments themselves, the stones and their inscriptions. The captain reported what he recalled, which was little. The stone over the Spartans' grave, he recollected, bore verses composed
by the poet Simonides, who himself stood present that day to assist in the dedication.
“Can you recall the epitaph upon the stone?” I inquired. “Or were the verses too lengthy for memory to retain?”
“Not at all,” the captain replied. “The lines were composed Spartan style. Short. Nothing wasted.”
So spare were they, he testified, that even one of as poor a memory as himself encountered no difficulty in their recollection.
        Â
O xein angellein Lakedaimoniois hoti tede
keimetha tois keinon rhemasi peithomenoi
        Â
These verses have I rendered thus, as best I can:
        Â
Tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
that here obedient to their laws we lie.
        Â
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It goes without saying that a work which attempts to imagine vanished worlds and cultures owes everything to the original literary sources, in this case Homer, Herodotus, Plutarch, Pausanias, Diodorus, Plato, Thucydides, Xenophon, and on and on. They're the real stuff, without which nothing.
Almost as indispensable, however, have been the extraordinary scholars and historians of our own time, whose published wisdom I have looted shamelessly. I hope they will forgive the author of this work of far less rigorous scholarship than their own if he acknowledges with gratitude and by name a number of these distinguished classicistsâPaul Cartledge, G. L. Cawkwell, Victor Davis Hansen, Donald Kagan, John Keegan, H. D. F. Kitto, J. F. Lazenby, E. V. Pritchett, W. K. Pritchett and, especially, Mary Renault.
In addition, I would like to thank two colleagues whose personal counsel and direction have been indispensable:
First, Hunter B. Armstrong, Director of the International Hoplology Society, for graciously sharing his expertise in hoplite weapons, tactics and practice and for his invaluable insights into, and imaginative reconstructions of, ancient battle. Himself an acclaimed weapons athlete, Mr. Armstrong's combatant's-eye-view assisted immeasurably in reimagining the experience of Greek heavy-infantry warfare.
Finally, my profound gratitude to Dr. Ippokratis Kantzios, Assistant Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, for his generous and encyclopedic assistance through all aspects of this undertaking, acting not only as guide and mentor for historical and linguistic authenticity and as translator (free as well as exact) of the epigraph and of passages and terms throughout this book, but for numerous other sage and inspired contributions. There's not a page in the book that doesn't owe something to you, Hip. Thanks for your innumerable creative contributions, your unfailing encouragement and your ever-Olympian counsel.
ALSO BY STEVEN PRESSFIELD
FICTION
The Virtues of War
Last of the Amazons
Tides of War
The Legend of Bagger Vance
NONFICTION
The War of Art
WARS CHANGE. WARRIORS DON'T.
S
TEVEN
P
RESSFIELD
,
the “master storyteller”
(Publishers Weekly)
and bestselling author, returns with a stunning, plausible near-future thriller about the rise of a privately financed and global military industrial complex.
THE PROFESSION
⢠A Thriller ⢠$25.00 (Canada: $28.95) ⢠978-0-385-52873-3
“The Profession
is chilling because it rhymes just enough with today to make us wonder whether this future will be, or only might be â¦Â A ripping read.”
âNATHANIEL FICK, author of the
New York Times
bestseller
One Bullet Way
“Pressfield dominates the military thriller genre.”
â
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The Profession
1
A BROTHER
MY MOST ANCIENT MEMORY
is of a battlefield. I don't know where. Asia maybe. North Africa. A plain between the hills and the sea.
The hour was dusk; the fight, which had gone on all day, was over. I was alive. I was looking for my brother. Already I knew he was dead. If he were among the living, he would have found me. I would not have had to look for him.
Across the field, which stretched for thousands of yards in every direction, you could see the elevations of ground where clashes had concentrated. Men stood and lay upon these. The dying and the dead sprawled across the lower ground, the depressions and the sunken traces. Carrion birds were coming down with the nightâcrows and ravens from the hills, gulls from the sea.
I found my brother's body, broken beneath the wheels of a battle wagon. Three stone columns stood above it on an eminenceâa shrine or gate of some kind. The vehicle's frame had been hacked through by axes and beaten apart by the blows of clubs; the traces were still on fire. All that remained aboveground of my brother was his left arm and hand, which still clutched the battle-axe by which I
recognized him. Two village women approached, seeking plunder. “Touch this man,” I told them, “and I will cut your hearts out.”
I stripped my cloak and wrapped my brother's body in it. The dames helped me settle him in the earth. As I scraped black dirt over my brother's bones, the eldest caught my arm. “Pray first,” she said.
We did. I stood at the foot of my brother's open grave. I don't know what I expected to feel: grief maybe, despair. Instead what ascended from that aperture to hell were such waves of love as I have never known in this life or any other. Do not tell me death is real. It is not. I have sustained my heart for ages with the love my brother passed on to me, dead as he was.
While I prayed, a commander passed on horseback. “Soldier,” he asked, “whom do you bury?” I told him. He reined in, he and his lieutenants, and bared his head. Who was he? Did I know him? When the last spadeful of earth had been mounded atop my brother's grave, the general's eyes met mine. He said nothing, yet I knew he had felt what I had, and it had moved him.
I am a warrior. What I narrate in these pages is between me and other warriors. I will say things that only they will credit and only they understand.
A warrior, once he reckons his calling and endures its initiation, seeks three things.
First, a field of conflict. This sphere must be worthy. It must own honor. It must merit the blood he will donate to it.
Second, a warrior seeks comrades. Brothers-in-arms, with whom he willingly undergoes the trial of death. Such men he recognizes at once and infallibly, by signs others cannot know.
Last, a warrior seeks a leader. A leader defines the cause for which the warrior offers sacrifice. Nor is this dumb obedience, as of a beast or a slave, but the knowing heart's pursuit of vision and significance. The greatest commanders never issue orders. Rather, they compel by their own acts and virtue the emulation of those they command.
The great champions throw leadership back on you. They make you answer: Who am I? What do I seek? What is the meaning of my existence in this life?
I fight for money. Why? Because gold purges vanity and self-importance from the fight. Shall we lay down our lives, you and I, for a flag, a tribe, a notion of the Almighty? I did, once. No more. My gods now are Ares and Eris. Strife. I fight for the fight itself. Pay me. Pay my brother.
I served once beneath a great commander who asked in council one night, of me and my comrades, if we believed our calling to be a species of penanceâa hell or purgatory through which we must pass, again and again, in expurgation of some crime committed eons gone.
“I do,” he said. He offered us as recompense for this passage “an unmarked grave on a hill with no name, for a cause we cannot understand, in the service of those who hate us.”
Not one of us hesitated to embrace this.
BOOK
ONE
EUPHRATES
2
ESPRESSO STREET
NINETY MILES SOUTH OF
Nazirabad, we sight a convoy of six vehicles speeding west and flying the black-and-yellow death's-head pennant of CounterArmor. The date is 15 August 2032. In that country, when you run into other Americans, you don't ask who they're working for, where they're from, or what they're up to. You help them.
We brake beside the CounterArmor vehicles in the lee of a thirty-foot sand berm. The team is pipeline security Their chief is a black dude, about forty, with a Chicago accent. “The whole goddam city's gone over!”
“Over to who?” I ask. A gale is shrieking, the last shreds of a sandstorm that has knocked out satellite and VHF comms for the past two and a half hours.
“Whoever the hell wants it!”
The CounterArmor commander's vehicle is a desert-tan Chevy Simoom with a reinforced-steel X-frame and a .50-caliber mounted topside. My own team is six men in three vehiclesâtwo Lada Neva up-armors and one RT-7, an Iraq-era 7-ton truck configured for air defense. The outfit is part of Force Insertion, the largest private
military force in the world and the one to whom all of western Iran has been contracted. I'm in command of the group, which is a standard MRT, Mobile Response Team. The overall contract is with ExxonMobil and BP.
The CounterArmor trucks are fleeing west for the Iraq border. The Turks have invaded, the chief is telling us. Or maybe it's the Russians. Tactical nukes have been used, near Qom and Kashan in the No-Go Zone; or maybe that's false too. “Get in behind us,” he shouts. “We're gonna need every gun we can get.”
I tell him our team has orders to enter the city. Five American engineers, civilian contractors, are trapped there, along with the TCNâThird Country Nationalsâsecurity detail assigned to protect them. Our instructions are to get them out, along with a technical brief they have prepared for the commanding general's eyes only.
“You can't go back there,” the chief says.
“Watch us.”
Nazirabad is a Shiite city of about three hundred thousand. They're all Shiite cities in Iran. You can tell a Shiite city by the billboards and the vehicles, which are plastered with pix of their saints, Ali and Hussein. A Shiite truck or bus is festooned with religious amulets and geegaws. Reflectorized pinwheels dangle from the rearview and outboard mirrors; framed portraits adorn the dash; every square inch is crazy quilted with talismans and mandalas, good luck charms and magic gimcracks.