A soldier's arms

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

This was bad. This was really bad.

"Come on! Put your back into it!" Simoniedes screamed into my ear. I braced against my shield and flailed around the edge with my sword. Each thrust pulled on the partially-healed gash in my side and I could feel blood running down the inside on my breastplate.

In the first minutes, the rows behind us had tried to use their spears but we were so few that the Immortals had started forcing us back down the pass. Now we were all just braced and pushing, just trying to hold back the onslaught while our rearguard dealt with the assault to our rear. If they could rejoin us, perhaps we could hold the pass for another day.....

Useless.

The Immortal facing me was being forced across my shield. I waited unto he was desperately focussed on keeping his balance on the cliff-edge, then thrust the point of my sword straight at his face. It cut through his lips, there was a brief scrape of bronze on teeth, then the point emerged through the back of his neck. With a coughing gurgle, he pitched over the cliff. His replacement was caught off-balance and fell straight after his comrade without coming near my sword. The next one stayed upright and slammed into my shield. I started raining blows around the side of my shield, feeling the crunch and bite of bone beneath my sword, trying to ignore the blood now running down my leg.

For an hour we held up. I spent the first few minutes killing, but my arm became leaden. "I can't do it!" I said to Simoniedes. "I can barely lift my arm".

"Just keep pushing! Let them force themselves off the edge!"

I was a rock in a wall. Braced hard into my shield. Eyes shut and just the blood in my head pounding...

.....pounding....


....pounding...

"Keep going! Stand up!". His voice came as if from far away. He could feel my legs starting to buckle.

....pounding....

...pounding....


"Don't do this!! Keep fighting!!"

....pounding....


....pounding...



.....pounding....





.....pounding...



"Fight, you bastard! You'll kill us all!! FIGHT!!!".

....pounding....

I'm so sorry, Simoniedes. If I could speak, I would tell you how ashamed I am that I'm failing. I would tell you how much you meant to me. I would tell you what an honour it was to serve with you. I would tell you that I loved you. But I can't do it anymore. I'm too tired of it all. Can't fight. Can't speak. Can't even keep pushing. I'm so sorry.

...and my shield dropped. And my legs gave way.

....and the Immortals surged forward, breaking our shield wall. As I pitched backwards over the cliff, I saw the fear in Simoniedes' eyes as a Persian spear impaled him through the throat...

Then nothing.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Final episode to follow.

[ChrisiusMaximus]

Absolutely breathtaking the suspense built into this is awesome, great work Laz dont make us wait too long.

[Richelieu]

Yes!

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

How many men had fallen down that cliff before me? Thousands, surely. When I landed, it was on yielding flesh and bone instead of rock. In a way, it's funny how all that death saved my life. I was unconscious for no more than an hour, and I could hear the battle still raging when I finally opened my eyes.

I made no attempt to rejoin it. Instead I buried my face in the corpses below me and played dead.

Others did the same. Two Messenians hid behind bodies in the battlefield beyond the pass, and it was from them that I learned of how the battle ended.

My collapse broke our shield-wall, and the Spartans were unable to rebuild it. The sheer weight of numbers on the Persian side forced them out of the pass, and for the first time they were fighting in open ground. In open ground, surrounded by enemies, hoplite tactics were largely useless and the closing stages of the battle for Thermopylae was a furious riot of man-to-man free combat with sword and shield. "Heroic combat", we call it, for it is a throwback to the time of heroes in the Trojan wars. It's the greatest misnomer ever- it's a confused slaughter.

What made them carry on? There was no hope of victory and no hope of rescue. The pass was lost, they were hopelessly outnumbered and were forced to break away from their tradition of organised close-rank combat. They were just fighting out of habit- to kill as many Persians as they could before they were cut down.

They were incredible.

Two loose knots of Spartans had formed, as they tried to reassert some degree of order. The smaller force was centred around King Leonidas and was fighting close to the pass of Thermopylae. The second and larger group (which included my friends Eumolpas and Perdiccas) had taken up a position on a small hill further back. Inevitably, Leonidas became the focus of attention. With his bodyguards whipped into a killing frenzy, our king took his final stand in a bid to turn this battlefield defeat into a heroic legacy. Though his judgement was suspect, his courage was never in doubt, and the Messenians described sprays of blood flying around him as he hacked at the remnants of Xerxes' Immortals with his sword.

It took the best part of an hour for his force to be overwhelmed. Sheer numbers of enemy wore them down and Leonidas was among the last to fall, still struggling despite carrying dozens of killing wounds. Our king was dead.

Amazingly, the real heroics were yet to come. The second Spartan force holding the hill, defying all credibility, launched a counter-attack towards the point where Leonidas had fallen. Eumolpas, the little joker, was at the front of the assault team as they attempted to force their way over to where our king's body lay. Twice they were forced back, but on the third charge they reached their target and started dragging the body back to the hill. A burly hoplite did the dragging while his comrades fought around him. Every few metres or so, one of them would fall to a Persian sword.

By the time they reached the hill, only a handful remained. Eumolpas was now carrying Leonidas' body, and struggling under the weight of the far bigger man. As he started to ascend the slope, a spear took him through the thigh and he collapsed. His last living minutes were spent writhing on the bloody ground, still lashing out at Persian limbs as their spears went in. His exploits you will know from the closing verses of "The battle-hymn of Leonidas", and he is justly remembered as a hero. To me, however, he'll always be that laughing boy ready to taunt anyone to distraction, not some celebrated corpse.

Perdiccas? Quiet and thoughtful Perdiccas, so heartbroken by the death of his friend. No songs name him, but he was the bravest of us all. He was one of the very last to fall. Despite their massive superiority in numbers, the Persians were demoralised. The Immortals were decimated, and they had no shock troops ready to take on these blood-drenched and crazed Spartan remnants. They could not take the hill. Every advance they made was beaten back, and their dead piled up on the slopes. Perdiccas was one of those at the redoubt- no-one will ever know just how many he killed, but it must have been hundreds. They would not give up. They would not die.

Xerxes was enraged, but even he failed to drive his terrified infantry back towards the slopes. Finally he massed all of his archers around the hill, and had them fire wave after wave of volleys at the Spartans. Tens of thousands of arrows fell on them, so many that the sky was screaming as they ripped through the air. One by one, hit repeatedly by the arrows, they fell. One of the last was Perdiccas, still trying to keep Persians back from the body of his king.

It was over.

***********************************

Sparta 450 BC

"That night, as I hobbled away from Thermopylae with the Messenians, we watched the first glows in the sky as Athens started to burn. The city was sacked, but the people had mostly been evacuated. In time it was rebuilt.

I stayed with the Messenians and lived as a helot. I never returned to my old life- how could I? About ten years after the battle, I saw Iannis again. He was a wealthy landowner- famed and rewarded as one of the few survivors of Leonidas' force. As far as he knows, he is the last survivor of our group, because I couldn't let him know I was alive."

The old soldier wiped the sweat from his eyes. "I never saw Simonides' body. I wanted to remember him for what he was, not as some butchered piece of meat. I was never really worthy of him. Never worthy of any of this". He stood up, and started to walk away from us.

"Wait!" called Cimon. "We don't even known your name."

He turned on his heel, and there in his eyes was the killing fury of the Spartan hoplite he once was. "Call me "coward". Or "traitor". They're the only names I've ever earned."

With that, he was gone. An awkward silence fell. Mardonius attempted to rouse us by singing "Leonidas", but no-one joined in and he quickly stammered to a halt.


The end.

*************************

Thanks for reading.

[ChrisiusMaximus]

Absolutely brilliant !!

[SKILORD]

Must agree here, quite an honor to be going against this in contest 17.

May the greatest find triumph.

[Sparkle]

Great!!! I was just confused at the name "Mardonius", first I thought that it was the Persian general.

[Skanky Burns]

That was superb!

[Easthaven I]

Whoa! Outstanding! Recently I began studying and getting into the battle of Thermopylae and figured it would be a perfect story to write about. Then I remembered coming across this one, and I came here and read it all just now. It is fantastic, man. At first, frustrated you beat me to it, but after reading it you did justice to the story, bro. I, too, planned to have the 'sole' survivor Spartan tell the story or a Spartan squire, but damn, I couldn't compete with this.

Good show, man! Good show!

Maybe there could be a Thermopylae 2 hanging around history somewhere that I could write about.

[vovan]

Period.

[Sparkle]

I just finished reading Gates of Fire today... but this story is better, IMHO... the Spartans in the book are just too godlike, always forgiving each other, making philosophical statements, Persians look unable, this looks more realistic.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Exactly. That's why I wrote this. Spartans were hard-as-nails farmer boys, not some warrior/philosopher/ubermenschen breed. I'm a historian, not a classicist, so I tried to render the events in a manner as far from legendary as I could.

[notyoueither]

You did a good job of that, Laz. A damn good job.

[steamthunk]

Thoroughly enjoyed reading it over the weekend. Glad to see that there's still some damn fine work around here.