A Victor of Salamis 40Book III · The Avenging of Leonidas
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Literature · Adventure
A Victor of Salamis 40
Book III · The Avenging of Leonidas
DavisEnglish
Morning at last, ruddy and windy. The Persian host had been long prepared. The Tartar cavalry with their bulls-hide targets and long lances, the heavy Persian cuirassiers, the Median and Assyrian archers with their ponderous wicker-shields, stood in rank waiting only the word that should dash them as sling-stones on Pausanias and his ill-starred following. The Magi had sacrificed a stallion, and reported that the holy fire gave every favouring sign. Mardonius went from his tent, all his eunuchs bowing their foreheads to the earth and chorussing, “Victory to our Lord, to Persia, and to the King.”
They brought Mardonius his favourite horse, a white steed of the sacred breed of Nisæa. The Prince had bound around his turban the gemmed tiara Xerxes had given him on his wedding-day. Few could wield the Babylonish cimeter that danced in the chieftain’s hand. The captains cheered him loudly, as they might have cheered the king.
“Life to the general! To the satrap of Hellas!”
But beside the Nisæan pranced another, lighter and with a lighter mount. The rider was cased in silvered scale-armour, and bore only a steel-tipped reed.
“The general’s page,” ran the whisper, and other whispers, far softer, followed. None heard the quick words passed back and forth betwixt the two riders.
“You may be riding to death, Artazostra. What place is a battle for women?”
“What place is the camp for the daughter of Darius, when her husband rides to war? We triumph together; we perish together. It shall be as Mazda decrees.”
Mardonius answered nothing. Long since he had learned the folly of setting his will against that of the masterful princess at his side. And was not victory certain? Was not Artazostra doing even as Semiramis of Nineveh had done of old?
“The army is ready, Excellency,” declared an adjutant, bowing in his saddle.
“Forward, then, but slowly, to await the reconnoitring parties sent toward the Greeks.”
In the gray morning the host wound out of the stockaded camp. The women and grooms called fair wishes after them. The far slopes of Cithæron were reddening. A breeze whistled down the hills. It would disperse the mist. Soon the leader of the scouts came galloping, leaped down and salaamed to the general. “Let my Lord’s liver find peace. All is even as our friends declared. The enemy have in part fled far away. The Athenians halt on a foot-hill of the mountain. The Laconians sit in companies on the ground, waiting their division that will not retreat. Let my Lord charge, and glory waits for Eran!”
Mardonius’s cimeter swung high.
“Forward, all! Mazda fights for us. Bid our allies the Thebans(16) attack the Athenians. Ours is the nobler prey—even the men of Sparta.”
“Victory to the king!” thundered the thousands. Confident of triumph, Mardonius suffered the ranks to be broken, as his myriads rushed onward. Over the Asopus and its shallow fords they swept, and raced across the plain-land. Horse mingled with foot; Persians with Tartars. The howlings in a score of tongues, the bray of cymbals and kettledrums, the clamour of spear-butts beaten on armour—who may tell it? Having unleashed his wild beasts, Mardonius dashed before to guide their ragings as he might. The white Nisæan and its companion led the way across the hard plain. Behind, as when in the springtime flood the watery wall goes crashing down the valley, so spread the thousands. A god looking from heaven would not have forgotten that sight of whirling plumes, plunging steeds, flying steel, in all the æons.
Five stadia, six, seven, eight,—so Mardonius led. Already before him he could see the glistering crests and long files of the Spartans—the prey he would crush with one stroke as a vulture swoops over the sparrow. Then nigh involuntarily his hand drew rein. What came to greet him? A man on foot—no horseman even. A man of huge stature running at headlong speed.
The risen sun was now dazzling. The general clapped his hand above his eyes. Then a tug on the bridle sent the Nisæan on his haunches.
“Lycon, as Mazda made me!”
The Spartan was beside them soon, he had run so swiftly. He was so dazed he barely heeded Mardonius’s call to halt and tell his tale. He was almost naked. His face was black with fear, never more brutish or loathsome.
“All is betrayed. Democrates is seized. Pausanias and Aristeides are warned. They will give you fair battle. I barely escaped.”
“Who betrayed you?” cried the Prince.
“Glaucon the Alcmæonid, he is risen from the dead. Ai! woe! no fault of mine.”
Never before had the son of Gobryas smiled so fiercely as when the giant cowered beneath his darting eyes. The general’s sword whistled down on the skull of the traitor. The Laconian sprawled in the dust without a groan. Mardonius laughed horribly.
“A fair price then for unlucky villany. Blessed be Mithra, who suffers me to give recompense. Wish me joy,”—as his captains came galloping around him,—“our duty to the king is finished. We shall win Hellas in fair battle.”
“Then it were well, Excellency,” thrust in Artabazus, “since the plot is foiled, to retire to the camp.”
Mardonius’s eyes flashed lightnings.
“Woman’s counsel that! Are we not here to conquer Hellas? Yes, by Mithra the Glorious, we will fight, though every dæva in hell joins against us. Re-form the ranks. Halt the charge. Let the bowmen crush the Spartans with their arrows. Then we will see if these Greeks are stouter than Babylonian, Lydian, and Egyptian who played their game with Persia to sore cost. And you, Artabazus, to your rear-guard, and do your duty well.”
The general bowed stiffly. He knew the son of Gobryas, and that disobedience would have brought Mardonius’s cimeter upon his own helmet. By a great effort the charge was stayed,—barely in time,—for to have flung that disorganized horde on the waiting Spartan spears would have been worse than madness. A single stadium sundered the two hosts when Mardonius brought his men to a stand, set his strong divisions of bowmen in array behind their wall of shields, and drew up his cavalry on the flanks of the bowmen. Battle he would give, but it must be cautious battle now, and he did not love the silence which reigned among the motionless lines of the Spartans.
It was bright day at last. The two armies—the whole strength of the Barbarian, the Spartans with only their Tegean allies—stood facing, as athletes measuring strength before the grapple. The Spartan line was thinner than Mardonius’s: no cavalry, few bowmen, but shield was set beside shield, and everywhere tossed the black and scarlet plumes of the helmets. Men who remembered Thermopylæ gripped their spear-stocks tighter. No long postponing now. On this narrow field, this bit of pebble and greensward, the gods would cast the last dice for the destiny of Hellas. All knew that.
The stolidity of the Spartans was maddening. They stood like bronze statues. In clear view at the front was a tall man in scarlet chlamys, and two more in white,—Pausanias and his seers examining the entrails of doves, seeking a fair omen for the battle. Mardonius drew the turban lower over his eyes.
“An end to this truce. Begin your arrows.”
A cloud of bolts answered him. The Persian archers emptied their quivers. They could see men falling among the foe, but still Pausanias stood beside the seers, still he gave no signal to advance. The omens doubtless were unfavourable. His men never shifted a foot as the storm of death flew over them. Their rigidity was more terrifying than any battle-shout. What were these men whose iron discipline bound so fast that they could be pelted to death, and no eyelash seem to quiver? The archers renewed their volley. They shot against a rock. The Barbarians joined in one rending yell,—their answer was silence.
Deliberately, arrows dropping around him as tree-blossoms in the gale, Pausanias raised his hand. The omens were good. The gods permitted battle. Deliberately, while men fell dying, he walked to his post on the right wing. Deliberately, while heaven seemed shaking with the Barbarians’ clamour, his hand went up again. Through a lull in the tumult pealed a trumpet. Then the Spartans marched.
Slowly their lines of bristling spear-points and nodding crests moved on like the sea-waves. Shrill above the booming Tartar drums, the blaring Persian war-horns pierced the screams of their pipers. And the Barbarians heard that which had never met their ears before,—the chanting of their foes as the long line crept nearer.
“Ah!—la—la—la—la! Ah!—la—la—la—la!” deep, prolonged, bellowed in chorus from every bronze visor which peered above the serried shields.
“Faster,” stormed the Persian captains to their slingers and bowmen, “beat these madmen down.” The rain of arrows and sling-stones was like hail, like hail it rattled from the shields and helms. Here, there, a form sank, the inexorable phalanx closed and swept onward.
“Ah!—la—la—la! Ah!—la—la—la!”
The chant never ceased. The pipers screamed more shrilly. Eight deep, unhasting, unresting, Pausanias was bringing his heavy infantry across the two hundred paces betwixt himself and Mardonius. His Spartan spearmen might be unlearned, doltish, but they knew how to do one deed and that surpassingly well,—to march in line though lightnings dashed from heaven, and to thrust home with their lances. And not a pitiful three hundred, but ten thousand bold and strong stood against the Barbarian that morning. Mardonius was facing the finest infantry in the world, and the avenging of Leonidas was nigh.
“Ah!—la—la—la! Ah!—la—la—la!”
Flesh and blood in the Persian host could not wait the death grip longer. “Let us charge, or let us flee,” many a stout officer cried to his chief, and he sitting stern-eyed on the white horse gave to a Tartar troop its word, “Go!”
Then like a mountain stream the wild Tartars charged. The clods flew high under the hoofs. The yell of the riders, the shock of spears on shields, the cry of dying men and dying beasts, the stamping, the dust-cloud, took but a moment. The chant of the Spartans ceased—an instant. An instant the long phalanx halted, from end to end bent and swayed. Then the dust-cloud passed, the chanting renewed. Half of the Tartars were spurring back, with shivered lances, bleeding steeds. The rest,—but the phalanx shook now here, now there, as the impenetrable infantry strode over red forms that had been men and horses. And still the Spartans marched, still the pipes and the war-chant.
Then for the first time fear entered the heart of Mardonius, son of Gobryas, and he called to the thousand picked horsemen, who rode beside him,—not Tartars these, but Persians and Medes of lordly stock, men who had gone forth conquering and to conquer.
“Now as your fathers followed Cyrus the Invincible and Darius the Dauntless, follow you me. Since for the honour of Eran and the king I ride this day.”
“We ride. For Eran and the king!” shouted the thousand. All the host joined. Mardonius led straight against the Spartan right wing where Pausanias’s life-guard marched.
Old soldiers of Lacedæmon fighting their battles in the after days, when a warrior of Platæa was as a god to each youth in Hellas, would tell how the Persian cavalrymen rode their phalanx down.
“And say never,” they always added, “the Barbarians know not how to fight and how to die. Fools say it, not we of Platæa. For our first line seemed broken in a twinkling. The Pitanate mora was cut to pieces; Athena Promachus and Ares the City-Waster alone turned back that charge when Mardonius led the way.”
But turned it was. And the thousand horse, no thousand now, drifted to the cover of their shield wall, raging, undaunted, yet beaten back.
Then at last the phalanx locked with the Persian footmen and their rampart of wicker shields. At short spear length men grinned in each other’s faces, while their veins were turned to fire. Many a soldier—Spartan, Aryan—had seen his twenty fights, but never a fight like this. And the Persians—those that knew Greek—heard words flung through their foemen’s helmets that made each Hellene fight as ten.
“Remember Leonidas! Remember Thermopylæ!”
Orders there were none; the trumpets were drowned in the tumult. Each man fought as he stood, knowing only he must slay the man before him, while slowly, as though by a cord tighter and ever tighter drawn, the Persian shield wall was bending back before the unrelenting thrusting of the Spartans. Then as a cord snaps so broke the barrier. One instant down and the Hellenes were sweeping the light-armed Asiatic footmen before them, as the scythe sweeps down the standing grain. So with the Persian infantry, for their scanty armour and short spears were at terrible disadvantage, but the strength of the Barbarian was not spent. Many times Mardonius led the cavalry in headlong charge, each repulse the prelude to a fiercer shock.
“For Mazda, for Eran, for the king!”
The call of the Prince was a call that turned his wild horsemen into demons, but demons who strove with gods. The phalanx was shaken, halted even, broken never; and foot by foot, fathom by fathom, it brushed the Barbarian horde back across the blood-bathed plain,—and to Mardonius’s shout, a more terrible always answered:—
“Remember Leonidas! Remember Thermopylæ!”
The Prince seemed to bear a charmed life as he fought. He was in the thickest fray. He sent the white Nisæan against the Laconian spears and beat down a dozen lance-points with his sword. If one man’s valour could have turned the tide, his would have wrought the miracle. And always behind, almost in reach of the Grecian sling-stones, rode that other,—the page in the silvered mail,—nor did any harm come to this rider. But after the fight had raged so long that men sank unwounded,—gasping, stricken by the heat and press,—the Prince drew back a little from the fray to a rising in the plain, where close by a rural temple of Demeter he could watch the drifting fight, and he saw the Aryans yielding ground finger by finger, yet yielding, and the phalanx impregnable as ever. Then he sent an aide with an urgent message.
“To Artabazus and the reserve. Bid him take from the camp all the guards, every man, every eunuch that can lift a spear, and come with speed, or the day is lost.”
The adjutant’s spurs grew red as he pricked away, while Mardonius wheeled the Nisæan and plunged back into the thickest fight.
“For Mazda, for Eran, for the king!”
His battle-call pealed even above the hellish din. The Persian nobles who had never ridden to aught save victory turned again. Their last charge was their fiercest. They bent the phalanx back like an inverted bow. Their footmen, reckless of self, plunged on the Greeks and snapped off the spear-points with their naked hands. Mardonius was never prouder of his host than in that hour. Proud—but the charge was vain. As the tide swept back, as the files of the Spartans locked once more, he knew his men had done their uttermost. They had fought since dawn. Their shield wall was broken. Their quivers were empty. Was not Mazda turning against them? Had not enough been dared for that king who lounged at ease in Sardis?
“For Mazda, for Eran, for the king!”
Mardonius’s shout had no answer. Here, there, he saw horsemen and footmen, now singly, now in small companies, drifting backward across the plain to the last refuge of the defeated, the stockaded camp by the Asopus. The Prince called on his cavalry, so few about him now.
“Shall we die as scared dogs? Remember the Aryan glory. Another charge!”
His bravest seemed never to hear him. The onward thrust of the phalanx quickened. It was gaining ground swiftly at last. Then the Spartans were dashing forward like men possessed.
“The Athenians have vanquished the Thebans. They come to join us. On, men of Lacedæmon, ours alone must be this victory!”
The shout of Pausanias was echoed by his captains. To the left and not far off charged a second phalanx,—five thousand nodding crests and gleaming points,—Aristeides bringing his whole array to his allies’ succour. But his help was not needed. The sight of his coming dashed out the last courage of the Barbarians. Before the redoubled shock of the Spartans the Asiatics crumbled like sand. Even whilst these broke once more, the adjutant drew rein beside Mardonius.
“Lord, Artabazus is coward or traitor. Believing the battle lost, he has fled. There is no help to bring.”
The Prince bowed his head an instant, while the flight surged round him. The Nisæan was covered with blood, but his rider spurred him across the path of a squadron of flying Medians.
“Turn! Are you grown women!” Mardonius smote the nearest with his sword. “If we cannot as Aryans conquer, let us at least as Aryans die!”
“Ai! ai! Mithra deserts us. Artabazus is fled. Save who can!”
They swept past him. He flung himself before a band of Tartars. He had better pleaded with the north wind to stay its course. Horse, foot, Babylonians, Ethiopians, Persians, Medes, were huddled in fleeing rout. “To the camp,” their cry, but Mardonius, looking on the onrushing phalanxes knew there was no refuge there....
And now sing it, O mountains and rivers of Hellas. Sing it, Asopus, to Spartan Eurotas, and you to hill-girt Alphæus. And let the maidens, white-robed and poppy-crowned, sweep in thanksgiving up to the welcoming temples,—honouring Zeus of the Thunders, Poseidon the Earth-Shaker, Athena the Mighty in War. The Barbarian is vanquished. The ordeal is ended. Thermopylæ was not in vain, nor Salamis. Hellas is saved, and with her saved the world.
Again on the knoll by the temple, apart from the rushing fugitives, Mardonius reined. His companion was once more beside him. He leaned that she might hear him through the tumult.
“The battle is lost. The camp is defenceless. What shall we do?”
Artazostra flung back the gold-laced cap and let the sun play over her face and hair.
“We are Aryans,” was all her answer.
He understood, but even whilst he was reaching out to catch her bridle that their horses might run together, he saw her lithe form bend. The arrow from a Laconian helot had smitten through the silvered mail. He saw the red spring out over her breast. With a quick grasp he swung her before him on the white horse. She smiled up in his face, never lovelier.
“Glaucon was right,” she said,—their lips were very close,—“Zeus and Athena are greater than Mazda and Mithra. The future belongs to Hellas. But we have naught for shame. We have fought as Aryans, as the children of conquerors and kings. We shall be glad together in Garonmana the Blessed, and what is left to dread?”
A quiver passed through her. The Spartan spear-line was close. Mardonius looked once across the field. His men were fleeing like sheep. And so it passed,—the dream of a satrapy of Hellas, of wider conquests, of an empire of the world. He kissed the face of Artazostra and pressed her still form against his breast.
“For Mazda, for Eran, for the king!” he shouted, and threw away his sword. Then he turned the head of his wounded steed and rode on the Spartan lances.
