Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

Author:Steven Pressfield
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780553904055
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-01-30T10:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

His Majesty is well familiar with the topography of the approaches, defiles and the compressed battle plain wherein his armies engaged the Spartans and their allies at the Hot Gates. I will pass over this, addressing instead the composition of the Greek forces and the state of discord and disorder which prevailed as these arrived and took station, preparatory to defending the pass.

When the Three Hundred—now reinforced by five hundred heavy infantry from Tegea and a matching number from Mantinea, along with two thousand combined from Orchomenos and the rest of Arkadia, Corinth, Phlius and Mycenae, plus seven hundred from Thespiae and four hundred from Thebes—arrived at Opountian Lokris, ten miles from the Hot Gates, there to be joined by a thousand heavy infantry from Phokis and Lokris, they found instead the entire countryside deserted.

Only a few boys and young men of the neighborhood remained, and these occupied themselves in looting the abandoned homes of their neighbors and appropriating whatever stores of wine they could disinter from their compatriots’ caches. They took to their heels at the sight of the Spartans, but the rangers ran them down. The army and populace of Lokris, the pimply pillagers reported, had taken to the hills, while the locals’ chieftains were scurrying north toward the Persians as fast as their spindly shanks would bear them. In fact, the urchins claimed, their headmen had already capitulated.

Leonidas was furious. It was determined, however, in a hasty and decidedly ungentle interrogation of these farmyard freebooters, that the Lokrians of Opus had gotten the day of assembly wrong. Apparently the month called Karneius in Sparta is named Lemendieon in Lokris. Further its start is counted backward from the full moon, rather than forward from the new. The Lokrians had expected the Spartans two days earlier and, when these failed to appear, determined that they had been left in the lurch. They bolted amid bitter oaths and maledictions, which the gales of rumor scattered swiftly into neighboring Phokis, in which country the Gates themselves are located and whose inhabitants were already in terror of being overrun. The Phokians had hightailed it too.

All along the march north, the allied column had encountered country tribes and villagers fleeing, streaming south along the military road, or what had now become a military road. Tattered clan groups fled before the Persian advance, bearing their pitiful possessions in shoulder sacks contrived from bedcovers or bundled cloaks, balancing their ragged parcels like water vessels atop their heads. Sunken-cheeked husbandmen wheeled handbarrows whose cargoes were more often flesh than furniture, children whose legs had given out from the tramp or bundled ancients hobbled with age. A few had oxcarts and pack asses. Pets and farm stock jostled underfoot, gaunt hounds cadging for a handout, doleful-looking swine being kicked along as if they knew they would be supper in a night or two. The main of the refugees were female; they trudged barefoot, shoes slung about their necks to save the leather.

When the women descried the allied

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