Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield Page B

“‘My’?” he demanded furiously. “‘My’?”
    Dienekes looked on, mortified, from where he stood at the edge of the upper camp. Alexandros was excruciatingly aware that his mentor was watching; he seemed to summon his composure, rally all his senses. The boy stepped forward, shield at high port. He straightened to attention before Polynikes and enunciated in his loudest, clearest voice:

    â€œThis is my shield.
    I bear it before me into battle,
    but it is not mine alone.
    It protects my brother on my left.
    It protects my city.
    I will never let my brother
    out of its shadow
    nor my city out of its shelter.
    I will die with my shield before me
    facing the enemy.”

    The boy finished. The last of his words, shouted at the top of his voice, echoed for a long moment around the valley walls. Twenty-five hundred men stood listening and watching.
    They could see Polynikes nod, satisfied. He barked an order. The boys resumed formation, each now with his shield in proper place, upright against its owner’s knees.
    â€œShields, port!”
    The boys lunged for their
hopla.
    Polynikes swung the tripod.
    With a crack that could be heard across the valley, the slashing sticks struck the bronze of Alexandros’ shield.
    Polynikes swung again, at the next boy and next. All shields were in place. The line protected.
    He did it again from the right and from the left. Now all shields leapt into the boys’ grips, all swiftly into place before them.
    There.
    With a nod to the platoon’s
eirene,
Polynikes stepped back. The boys held fast at attention, shields at high port, with the blood beginning to cake dry on their empurpled cheekbones and shattered noses.
    Polynikes repeated his order to the drill instructor, that these sheep-stroking sons of whores would do tree-fucking till the end of the second watch, then shield drill till dawn.
    He walked once down the line, meeting each boy’s eye. Before Alexandros, he halted.
    â€œYour nose was too pretty, son of Olympieus. It was a girl’s nose.” He tossed the boy’s tripod into the dirt at his feet. “I like it better now.”

NINE
    O ne of the boys died that night. His name was Hermion; they called him “Mountain.” At fourteen he was as strong as any in his age-class or the class above, but dehydration in combination with exhaustion overcame him. He collapsed near the end of the second watch and fell into that state of convulsive torpor the Spartans call
nekrophaneia,
the Little Death, from which a man may recover if left alone but will die if he tries to rise or exert himself. Mountain understood his extremity but refused to stay down while his mates kept their feet and continued their drill.
    I tried to make the platoon take water, I and my helot mate Dekton, whom they later called “Rooster.” We snuck a skin to them around the middle of the first watch, but the boys refused to accept it. At dawn they carried Mountain in on their shoulders, the way the fallen in battle are borne.
    Alexandros’ nose never did heal properly. His father had it broken again, twice, and reset by the finest battle surgeons, but the seam where the cartilage meets the bone never mended quite right. The airway would constrict involuntarily, triggering those spasms of the lungs called by the Greeks
asthma,
which were excruciating simply to watch and must have been unbearable to endure. Alexandros blamed himself for the death of the boy called Mountain. These fits, he was certain, were the retribution of heaven for his lapse of concentration and unwarrior-like conduct.
    The spasms enfeebled Alexandros’ endurance and made him less and less a match for his age-mates within the
agoge.
Worse still was the unpredictability of the attacks. When they hit, he was good for nothing for minutes at a stretch. If he could not find a way to reverse this condition, he could not when he reached manhood be made a warrior; he would