Persian Fire (48 page)

'In league with Athena set your own hand to work': so the proverb went.
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For the moment, however, the initiative had slipped from Themistocles' grasp. His next move would depend on what others did first: the Persians — and the gods of the winds. Still there were no new developments - and still the temperature rose. Then, at last, some ten days, perhaps, after the Greek fleet had abandoned its station at Artemisium, there was a sudden wake-up call. A thirty-oared cutter, captained by an Athenian, a crony of Themistocles named Abronichus, came speeding down the straits to Chalcis. Appointed at the start of the campaign to serve as the liaison officer between Leonidas and the Greek fleet, Abronichus brought his friend alarming news. The phoney war, it appeared, was over. The Great King's army was approaching Thermopylae. The Mede was at the Hot Gates.

Lookouts were hardly needed to warn of the approach of the King of Kings. Well before the first Persian reconnaissance units began spilling out over the flatlands along the shore of the Malian Gulf, Leonidas would have known that a force beyond computation was closing in on him. Cloudless the August sky may have been, but the horizon to the north was lost behind a haze of dust. Ever filthier, thicker, more swirling it grew; and then the earth itself, trampled beneath thousands upon thousands of kicking feet, began to tremble. Such, rendered literal, was the power of the Great King: that he could shake the world. For years, his agents had inflicted on the Greeks a strategy of creeping terror; and now, at last, the terror was at their gates.

For the defenders of Thermopylae, gazing in horror across the bay, the spectacle of the Great King's hordes was of an order beyond their darkest imaginings. On and on, the din of their progress now thunderous, shimmering in and out of view, borne upon rolling breakers of choking dust, the barbarians advanced. To the Greeks, wiping grit from their watering eyes, feeling the earth beneath them shiver for hour after ceaseless hour, the reports of the three spies sent to Sardis, who had spoken of Asia being emptied, and of millions being mustered against them, must have seemed horrifically confirmed. Panic began to grip the tiny army. All except the Spartans, that is, who maintained their customary composure; and Leonidas, even as he sought to steady nerves among the allies, ordered his bodyguard to hold a position beyond the wall. Soon enough, clattering up through the West Gate, there came a Persian outrider. None of the three hundred looked up. Some combed their long hair, as was the Spartan habit when preparing to face death. Others, their naked bodies slippery with oil, ran or grappled with one another; not strenuously, however, for 'on campaign, the exercising required of the Spartans was always less demanding than normal
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so that for them, uniquely, war represented a relaxation of military training'." The Persian scout, having surveyed this scene in astonishment, then wheeled round and galloped away. No attempt was made by the Spartans to stop him.

Later in the day, a formal embassy from Xerxes approached the Hot Gates. Leonidas, who would surely have met it beyond the wall so that the ambassadors could not see how few men he had under his command, was informed of the Great King's terms. The defenders, if they laid down their arms, might have a free passage back to their homes; the title 'Friends of the Persian People' would be granted them; 'and on all the Greeks who accepted his friendship, King Xerxes would settle more lands, and of better quality, than any they currently possessed'.
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To many of the Peloponnesians, already itching to scuttle back to the Isthmus, these proposals only confirmed them in their sudden enthusiasm for a retreat from the pass; but the Phocians, for whom the Isthmus might as well have been in Egypt for all the protection it afforded them, responded with fury to the prospect of abandoning Thermopylae. So too, unsurprisingly, did Leonidas; and since he was the commander-in-chief, and a Spartan king to boot, his resolution was sufficient to sway the waverers. The allies would stay where they were. The pass would be held. When the Great King's embassy, returning to the Hot Gates, demanded that the Greeks hand over their arms, Leonidas' defiance was aptly laconic:
'Molon labe';
Come and get them'.
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His countrymen had always prized such gems of cool. The bleaker the circumstances, the more imperturbable a Spartan was trained to be: and Leonidas, perfectly aware that sang-froid was the best morale-booster that he could offer his wavering allies, naturally looked to his bodyguard to back him up with some steely nonchalance of their own. They did not disappoint. When the barbarians fired their arrows, one of the locals pointed out tremulously, so many would hiss-through the air as to blot out the sun. The Spartans, who were in the habit of dismissing arrows as mere spindles, womanish and cowardly, affected to be colossally unfazed. 'What excellent news,' one of them drawled. 'If the Mede hides the sun, then so much the better for us — we can fight our battle in the shade.'
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Yet, inspiring though such witticisms surely were, they must have struck Leonidas as perilously close to gallows humour. He knew that in truth the situation facing his men was even graver than most of them appreciated. Themistocles and the Greek fleet, still praying for storms, remained at Chalcis. With Artemisium abandoned, there was nothing now to stop the Persian fleet, once it arrived off Euboea, from heading directly for the shallows off Thermopylae. Such a moment, with the Great King already installed beyond the Hot Gates, could hardly be far off. As Leonidas scanned the eastern horizon, searching for distant masts, he would have watched the deepening of twilight over the Malian Gulf and the blazing of campfires in the pass with profound relief. Night had come - and the Persian fleet had not. The allies still held Thermopylae. But for how much longer? Nervously, men glanced above them. The moon, almost full, gleamed in a cloudless, windless sky. So it would also be gleaming over distant Olympia, and Lacedaemon too. Even though Leonidas had sent messengers to the Isthmus earlier that afternoon with a desperate appeal for reinforcements, he knew that there was little chance of it being answered — not for another week or so, at least, until the games at Olympia and the Carneia were over. And time was running out.

Dawn broke. Still there came no hints of an imminent assault upon the pass. Along the coastal road, straggling units of the Great King's army and his baggage train picked their way towards his camp. Beyond the Malian Gulf itself, the straits remained empty of Persian shipping. The imperial fleet was surely out there somewhere, closing in from the north, making for a rendezvous with the King of Kings — but where? Perhaps the new day would bring the answer. The sea, touched by the rays of morning, stretched away calm and clear, framing the blue silhouette of Euboea. Far distant, to the north-east, rose the peaks of Magnesia. All was still: curiously, brightly, menacingly still. A sailor, bred to recognise the moods of the Aegean, might have read what the moment portended; but there were few sailors at Thermopylae. The change in the weather, then, coming abruptly as it did, on a sudden howling of wind, must have struck them as something eerie and unearthly, as the breath of the gods indeed. Seemingly from nowhere, a gale began to sweep across the bay, whipping up the waves, lashing the defenders of the Hot Gates with plumes of spray. The light of the dawn darkened to blackness, and thunder rumbled distantly over the Aegean.
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The Hellesponter, much yearned-for, long prayed-for, had come at last — 'and all the sea began to boil with it, like water in a pot'.
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Two days the storm raged. Two days the allies remained huddled beside the Middle Gate, the Spartans with their scarlet cloaks wrapped tightly about them, as the gales swept in from the sea. Two days the barbarians bided their time, making no assault on the pass. Instead, both sides watched the weather, scanned the eastern horizon, and sweated on news of their missing fleets. By the third morning of the storm, with the winds at last starting to ease, flotsam, drifting in from the straits off Euboea, could be glimpsed across the Malian Gulf, bobbing on the choppy waters. Then, distant across the grey sea, squadrons of ships began emerging into view, straining against the winds, bearing north. The Greek fleet had survived the storm; and now it was returning, to the immense relief of the small army at Thermopylae, to its station at Artemisium. The links in the chain had been reforged. The front, for the moment, at any rate, could be held. And still no certain sighting of the enemy fleet.

Reports brought that evening by the liaison officer serving at Artemisium suggested why. Heading for the Sciathos gap, the barbarians had been caught on the open sea. The coast of Magnesia, battered by the full force of the gale, was said to be littered with corpses, spars and gold. The precise number of ships lost to the storms was as yet a matter of conjecture, but there were some among the Greek fleet who dared to claim 'that there would be only a few left to oppose them'.
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Hardly, of course, a forecast that Leonidas himself could echo: on the plain beyond the West Gate, the barbarian campfires still blazed numberless. There too the carnage off Magnesia would have been reported. The failure to outflank Thermopylae by sea would have been digested. A new plan of attack would have been ordered, and urgently, for the Great King, with hundreds of thousands of mouths to feed, could hardly afford to kick his heels. The implications for Leonidas and his tiny army that evening appeared self-evident — and menacing. Four days they had waited for the Great King to make a frontal assault on their position, and on the following morning, the fifth, all the multitudes of Asia would surely be hurled against them. Their resolve and courage would be put to a test such as few men had ever had to face before; not even in the days of song; not even on the fields of Troy. Combing their hair, sharpening their weapons, burnishing their shields to a dazzling brightness, the Spartans prepared for the dawn, and for what, all their lives, they had been raised to give: a display of the art of killing.

And sure enough, sunrise coming, the barbarian came as well. It was the Medes who had been given the task of clearing the pass. These were men skilled in all the requirements of mountain warfare, well armoured too, their mail coats glittering like the scales of iron fish, and their very name had long been a terror to the Greeks. Leonidas, however, had chosen his position carefully, and the Medes, practised though they may have been at climbing the defiles of the Zagros, found it impossible to scale the cliffs of the Middle Gate and outflank the defenders' line. Nor, in the closeness of the pass, was there sufficient space for them to unleash what might otherwise have proved an equally lethal strategy: the firing of a rain of arrows so heavy as to serve the sweltering Spartans as a sun-block. Instead, breasting the pass, hurrying to the attack, the Medes found themselves with little choice but to charge directly at the shield wall and attempt to batter it aside. But this was the form of warfare in which all hoplites, supremely, were battle trained; and the shields of the Medes were fashioned of wicker, while their spears were much shorter than those of the Greeks.

So it was that their weight of numbers, although it might have appeared overwhelming, failed to tell. Never before having tested themselves against the barbarian, the Spartans would have known within seconds of the first impact that they had the measure of their assailants. There could be no doubting the bravery of the Medes, men prepared to throw themselves against a line of bristling spears and shields, but they provided, even in their fish-scales, easy prey for a wall of bronze-clad professional killers. Within minutes, the front had taken on the character of a charnel-house. The Spartans employed their spear-heads and swords to eviscerate, and their skill in 'fighting close to their enemies'
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was a thing of horror to their fellow Greeks. Now, in the hellish closeness of the Hot Gates, the Medes learned to share in that dread. Those who fell did so with gaping wounds; those still on their feet found themselves soused with blood, slithering over entrails, stumbling over the growing piles of the dead.

For the Greeks too, though, straining to hold their positions against the seething crush of the enemy, the fight was desperate. Butting back their assailants with their heavy shields, jabbing, slashing, hacking all they could, feeling the sun steadily heating up the bronze of their armour, soaked in sweat and blood, those in the line of battle could hardly be expected to hold their position all the day. Nor were they: for Leonidas, with cool efficiency, ensured a regular transfusion of fresh troops to the front. Those withdrawn could remove their armour, have a drink, and bandage their wounds. Even a Spartan might sometimes need to catch his breath.

And particularly so because Leonidas, uncertain what further tactics the King of Kings might employ, needed his elite corps primed to cope with any sudden emergency. All day the battle continued to rage, until the Greeks, having seen off the Medes, and then reinforcements from Susa, found themselves, as the shadows lengthened, facing precisely such a moment of crisis. A glittering of jewelled weaponry, a shimmering of exquisite colours, and the Immortals, the most proficient and dreaded of all the Great King's regiments, as supreme among the Persians as the Spartans were among the Greeks, advanced into the pass. To meet them, Leonidas ordered all his bodyguard back to the front line — 'and there the Lacedaemonians fought in a manner never to be forgotten'.
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Courage, strength and resolution they displayed, as was only to be expected; but also a murderous talent for the tactical manoeuvre. At a signal, they would turn, stumble, appear to flee in panic; and then, as the enemy surged forwards in triumph, their discipline momentarily forgotten, the Spartans would wheel round, reform their line with a fearsome clattering of shields, and hack down their pursuers. This tactic was doubly demoralising to their assailants: for, apart from the casualties that it inflicted, it served to rub their noses in the brute fact of the Spartans' continued battle worthiness, even after a whole day's fighting, even amid the heat, and the blood, and the stench and the flies. Reluctant to squander his best troops fruitlessly, the Great King at length ordered their withdrawal, and the Immortals retreated back through the West Gate. The pass was left to the evening shadows, the carnage and the Greeks.