Chapter 20: Thermopylae
THE man behind the siblings jumped on them and the fighters before them charged forward. Nora feinted to avoid the blade coming down from above, pushing Stephanie aside and jabbing the assailant’s swinging arm to disarm him in one quick movement.
The fellow grabbed his wound, wailing in pain, and stumbled into the path of his colleagues trying to reach the trio. He almost blocked the narrow corridor through which his fellow fighters must pass and curses were rained on him.
“Did you see that?” Nora enthusiastically asked the others in ancient Greek, but she realized they had already left her and hurried after them.
One by one, the soldiers broke through their colleague’s blockade and again charged the fleeing three. Noiselessly.
“Who are they?” Stephanie demanded, puffing as she ran beside the others. “Why do they hide their faces?”
“We are as lost as you are, sister,” Nora confessed.
“You cannot be, Dora! You are . . .”
“What did you just call me?”
“Dora?”
“What?”
“Dora.”
“You do not need to shout, Stephena,” the older girl stressed, surprising herself as well.
“Great,” Matthew cried. A very steep cliff before them led one out from the precipitous valley and he knew it was folly to attempt it without ropes. “There is no way out! The mountains around here are almost impossible to climb.”
“You know as much as that?” an amazed Nora asked him.
“I know only as much as you do, Dora,” Matthew said. He shrugged, turning to back the almost vertical slope with Stephanie. The hideously masked soldiers stopped at an imaginary line not far away and slowly advanced forward.
“I will handle this,” Nora whispered and stepped out towards the men, her two swords glinting in the bright afternoon sun.
Matthew realized he was feeling very strange and wondered why he subconsciously thought that Dora would be a hoplite when she turned twenty. At least he knew the Phidita was a kind of public meal. Who was a hoplite?
The fighters laughed at Dora when she approached them, but the laughter died away when she dauntlessly exhibited her skills with both swords, swinging these in quick succession and pushing them back with fear. Finally she dared them with her ramrod posture and raised chin.
The swordsmen before her withdrew and intrepid archers took up their positions. “Not good,” her younger sister said, sighing behind her, and Nora sadly dropped her swords. She was beginning to like them.
The three children were seized and taken back through the narrow passage they had earlier found themselves in. They were being led out of the mountainous region and towards the open sea, because they could see an open coastline down below and the blue sea embracing this landmass.
“Where are they taking us?” Stephanie wanted to know, but again, the other two were as lost as she was.
A very large camp spread out from a point before them far into the horizon. Unusual boats littered the shoreline in their thousands, and as they climbed down a rocky area towards this very large settlement, they realized they were looking at a military camp.
“What are we getting ourselves into?” Matthew whispered in Greek and Nora simply shuddered and sighed.
“Beats me,” she said in the same language and the soldiers behind her violently pushed her forward.
“Do not do that again,” Stephanie yelled at them and they removed their masks to glare at her, forcing her to timidly turn away while whispering her apologies. She felt so small when they got to the outskirts of the settlement, but started enjoying the exotic environment around her as they neared the main entrance.
Camels led by their herders pondered about amidst very huge, bare-chested men, who stood guard with broadly curved swords fastened to their large girths. Stephanie found their somewhat baggy pants and pointed slippers very funny looking indeed and did her best to hide her amusement as they entered the settlement proper. Here, soldiers milled around in groups and obsequious female slaves wearing silver beads and silk attire followed them about.
Matthew tried to ignore these women and also turned away a closely-observant Stephanie whenever he had to.
Elephants were trumpeting from a nearby, open compound and the three siblings could also hear the roar of lions, as well as the weird sound made by other wild beasts in another large, but closed, animal-skin tent. Horses also flooded the area and slaves attended to many of these, while others looked like they were being prepared for serious battle, their would-be riders gathered round a golden throne on which sat a very striking fellow.
“Xerxes,” Nora spat out, staring at the throne.
“What?” Matthew didn’t hear her properly.
“Xerxes,” she quietly repeated out of earshot.
Matthew wondered whether he should assign this assertion to her or Dora, her new, schizophrenic half. Obviously, they were now slipping into the roles being thrown their way by the book more easily, and his senior sister was getting the hang of it faster than either him or Stephanie, who follows behind her in this behavior. “Who is Xerxes, Dora?” he put to her, but she relapsed into silence as they passed the massive, golden throne. Maybe her Dora knew where they were and might help them find Barbara in the long run, although he feared this new twist in their ordeal, because he didn’t know what it might mean for their sanity.
“Khshayarsha!” rang out from the throats of the horsemen surrounding the guy on the golden edifice and Matthew stared at the man on this kingly chair. He was delivering a forceful speech to his men.
Quite tall and muscular in a handsome way, this individual had silver rings hanging from his nose. Some bigger ones encircled his throat and he wore a thin silk shirt. His baggy pants were made of the same silky material with designs of gold threads running through it, while his shoes were pointed like those of his soldiers but also studded with emeralds.
“Khshayarsha! Khshayarsha! Khshayarsha!” the soldiers roared after the speech and ran out to their waiting horses before the man. They rode away towards the main entrance and Matthew wondered where they were going. The huge, but tamed, living tigers sitting on either side of the golden throne caused his junior sister some discomfort, but he tried to comfort her with an embrace.
“What do they want from us, Mathildes?” she asked him as soon as she was disengaged from him by a soldier and he confusedly stared at her before realizing she was talking to him.
“I do not . . . know,” he blurted out. Nora still had that trance-like gaze when he turned to her. “Nora?”
“What?” she demanded in English. Was it English? Was he also speaking English? Men and women dressed like them were coming together in one place and they were roughly pushed into this group by the laughing, unconcerned soldiers. Nora appeared anxious of their situation once again.
“Who is Xerxes?” Matthew asked her in whatever language they were both speaking.
“Who?”
“Xerxes?” he repeated, nodding towards the throne.
“Gosh,” she exclaimed, staring at the Persian king. “Is that Xerxes?”
“You know him?” Matthew really hoped she did.
“Uhuuuh.” She nodded.
“From History class,” they both said.
“He fought the Greeks in Thermopylae and Salamis in . . . what, 480 B.C?” she tried to recall. “Actually, he lost in Salamis. Oh my God! This means we could be . . . Spartans, right?”
“Spartans? Who were they?” Matthew demanded in ancient Greek and his senior sister suddenly looked straight into his eyes like an obsessed soldier would, freaking him out with this abrupt reversion to her previous demeanor.
“Who we are, you mean?” she whispered. “We are citizens of Laconia, the most famous Greek city of the Pelopónnisos, on the right bank of River Evrótas and in the foothills of Mount Taygetus, my dear Mathildes. You of all people should know that.”
“Yeah, sure,” Matthew agreed
in English, but suddenly remembered that a hoplite stood for a Greek soldier. Something was definitely wrong with them all.
“The hoplite is right, Mathildes,” an old man in their midst said. “You have forgotten who you are and that is very bad.”
“Who are you?” Matthew asked him.
“I am Monocles, an Athenian member of the Eupatridae and now a prisoner of Persia,” the man said. At least his attire upheld the fact that what he’d just conveyed had some truth in it. They looked quite different and . . . richer.
“How did you get here?” Matthew wanted to know.
“I am part of a Greek delegation on its way to solicit for help from those barbarians in Macedonia,” the man replied. “I was captured with my two sons near Pharsalus by the Immortals and brought here to die.”
“Who are the Immortals?”
“They are these masked men all around us. I think they are the royal bodyguards.”
“Drasthus never told us how big this army was,” Dora said beside Mathildes. “Even if he had done this, his calculation would never have equaled what we now see today! I reckon Xerxes must still have ships at sea.”
“Mathildes, you must save us,” Stephena begged.
Matthew was comparing Stephanie’s attire with Nora’s and his own with Monocles’. He thought he didn’t hear his younger sister right. He thought he wasn’t well, himself. “How do I do that?” he asked her in that same ancient Greek.
“You will find a way, Mathildes,” Nora whispered in the same language. “You always do.”
“But you must be quick about it,” Monocles urged the boy, pointing towards a tent’s entrance through which the Greeks were being dragged in one by one. “Their priests will soon behead us to their gods if you do not.”
The prisoners could hear the cries of those being killed from within the tent.
“First, we must plan our escape,” Mathildes said, turning towards the throne on which still sat the Persian king. The young ruler kept turning to look at Dora and Matthew noticed this. Grabbing Stephena and Dora by the arm, he pulled them towards the guards surrounding the prisoners.
“Matthew, what are you doing?” Nora asked him in English. “Are you out of your mind? You will kill us all.”
“We’ve got to save Barbara before leaving and I know she’s here,” he told her. “Just trust me.”
The soldiers shoved him back three times.
“But I must see the king,” he wailed in Old Persian, surprising even himself. Could it be that he could control Mathildes all this while? “I bring news from Leonidas, himself.”
At the mention of this name, the king stood up from his throne and glared openly at the three young slaves causing trouble in the midst of his prisoners. “Let them come,” he told the guards and they parted way for the trio to pass.
Monocles and two young men made to join the three children and some other soldiers stopped the Athenians.
“They are with us,” Mathildes quickly told these fighters and the king nodded for his men to let the Athenians through.
Xerxes looked down with disdain on some human skulls placed on gold plates beside him. He wondered why the slave boy had mentioned the name of his worst enemy in such a manner. The Greek king whose head he was yet to place on a platter of gold like every other ruler he had conquered. Presently he looked up to see the Greek slaves standing before him. The three younger ones were gaping at the skulls before they were forced into bowing to him. “What news is there from my present enemy?” he simply asked the boy in a resounding guttural voice. “Has he decided to see reason before my mighty Persian horses crush him and his small crowd of maddened men against Thermopylae’s highest cliff?”
Matthew couldn’t hide his fascination at being so close to this giant of a man, though he knew it would be very difficult trying to sell peace to this particular king. “Hail Xerxes, king of forty nations and beyond,” he began. “We come bearing gifts for my mighty lord from his subordinate, Leonidas I, king of Sparta! I—We present to you, Dora, the hoplite,” and he pushed a nervous, hesitant Nora forward. “She is the best female soldier in Sparta and I—We hope my lord . . . finds her abilities, as we will soon display before thee, very pleasing in thy sight.” Matthew never knew he was such a good orator.
“Beware of the Greeks and the gifts they bear,” the king candidly retorted before joining his soldiers in wild laughter.
“We bring true gifts, my lord,” Monocles said. “Athens and her smaller neighbors offer you earth and water alongside this . . . goddess of Sparta.”
“After you have killed my father’s heralds and thrown them into wells?” Xerxes accused. “Why do you bring this gift now? You fear the blades of my priests? What of the little girl?”
“She is our gift’s slave,” Matthew said. “She is bound for life to her mistress.” Stephanie could have killed him instead of surprisingly staring and frowning at him had she understood his words.
“And what about the rest of you?” he was asked. The king’s eyes were penetrating. The deep silence after his words appeared final.
“You—You can do to us as you please,” Matthew stammered. “We will serve you to the very end.” He knew he just needed more time anyhow he could get it.
“To the very end, you say?” the Persian ruler thoughtfully repeated. His eyes were watching the commotion at his stronghold’s entrance and the Greek boy slowly turned to see what was happening there with his companions. Several free horses were trotting into the Persian camp and the soldiers near the gate were angrily swearing and cursing the Greeks, because these mounts were the very same ones horsemen had earlier directed towards Thermopylae and the ferocious battle being waged there. “Why, I should have known!” he exploded. “Beware of the Greeks and the gifts they bear.”
“He sends gifts and at the same time slaughters our cavaliers,” a Persian noble said behind Mathildes and the others.
The man might have never heard of self defense, but the Greek slaves standing before his king, especially Mathildes and the old Athenian, knew they were in serious trouble.
Stephanie made to step back and Matthew held her tightly. “No, Stephena,” he admonished her. “We must face our fate bravely, but you—surely you do not suppose that Xerxes, the great god of men, lacks a heart of mercy?”
“I do not,” the king agreed, “but I cannot speak for my men.”
The six Greek prisoners were seized.
“There goes your plan,” Dora told Mathildes.
“Bathe them,” the Persian ruler ordered. “Bathe them and dress them like Persian nobles! Then let stakes run through their bodies from their loins to their heads and stand these poles before those fools blocking our way.”
They were all dragged away.
“It is your kings and nobles I want here before me,” the king growled after them. “They must bring this message of goodwill, themselves! They must promise to serve me to the very end, themselves! They must kiss the earth before me, themselves, and beg for my mercy before I give it.”