The gap year, p.46
The Gap Year, page 46
“So. A witch.” As Xerxes spoke, Hylas went to one knee beside Anna, then stood again at his negligent wave. “Do witches not know how to greet emperors?”
Two flanking guards made as if to seize Anna and force her obeisance, but they left off at a glance from Xerxes. “Well?” he asked.
“Your attack can’t possibly work now.” Anna finally found her voice, though she stumbled over the unfamiliar syllables of the Persian language. “It sounds like you’ve already found out why.” She stiffened her spine. “If you don’t turn back soon, it’ll be too late.”
“How do you know she is a witch?” Xerxes asked Hylas, as though he hadn’t heard Anna’s words.
“My lord, she possesses great strength.” Hylas’ voice was as smooth as ever, even though he might be only words away from death, or worse. “I watched with my own eyes as she overcame five strong men, myself among them, and snapped a heavy staff between her hands as you would a stick of kindling. She also consorts with a familiar, a giant talking hound.” Hylas’ neck reddened at Xerxes’ expression of tolerant ridicule, though his face didn’t change. “And she introduced into Athens a new form of medicine, one with great efficacy in healing the sick. I have been searching for her for some time now. Then suddenly she appears, just as we hear of uncanny goings-on within our ranks. I am certain that she holds knowledge that would help turn the tide of battle in our favor.”
“We need no hidden knowledge for that.” A giant of a man in gold-chased armor spoke up from beside Xerxes. “Given my lord’s command, his Immortals and I would easily smash through this pitiable force we see huddling before us.”
“I have no doubt of it, Hydarnes.” Xerxes laughed, at ease. “The Medes and the Kissians will take a turn at the enemy first, but there will be glory enough for all of you. With one stroke, I will avenge my father’s defeat, and make the empire greater than it has ever been.” He looked at Anna, finally seeming to fully register her presence. “Watch and learn, little witch. It is not weapons which win battles, but will.” He nodded to Hydarnes, who bowed and left the platform, issuing terse commands as he joined the rest of the military men on the ground. Then Xerxes spread his arms before him mockingly, indicating that Anna should look for herself.
She turned warily away from the emperor and looked over the railing of the platform, over the heads of thousands of soldiers holding a forest of spears. Half a mile or so to the east along the narrow, rocky shore was the front line of the Persian army. Then, across another few hundred yards of no-man’s land, tiny with distance, stood the armored Greek defenders at Thermopylae.
As Anna watched, the Greek army roared its defiance, clashing sword hilts against shields and stamping their feet. But at this distance the sound came only faintly to her ears, almost masked by the ambient noises of so many Persian soldiers packed so closely together.
The Persians roared back in response, tens of thousands of men bellowing all around her, jabbing spears and swords up at the sky. The noise was overpowering, an ocean of sound that raised the hairs on her neck and forearms before it finally subsided.
For agonizing seconds, the tension rose. Then, at some unseen signal far ahead in the Persian forces, the first volley of arrows arced up toward the Greeks, and the battle began.
78
“Anna’s back in contact.” Indy quickly summarized their conversation for the rest of the party. “She says she has a plan, but we haven’t had a chance to discuss it yet.”
“She appears to be safe for the moment.” Melas looked up from his phone, shaking his head. “But I still wish she had not taken this upon herself.”
“Let’s get under cover.” Indy looked into the distance as she consulted her collar. “I’ll try to figure something out.” Her ears lay back with worry. “We could still move a little farther away from the battle without losing contact with our drones. But then if Anna… there must be something we can do besides just running away.”
There was an anxious silence among the company as they moved off the trail and back into the trees, where they could lay down their packs and watch events unfold with less chance of discovery. Indy propped her screen against the trunk of a tree where she could watch it comfortably while lying down. Argos curled up at her side, keeping an eye back toward the trail. The Greeks sat or rested against their packs, watching on their phones as the huge Persian army advanced.
The Greek defenders had reinforced an ancient wall at Thermopylae that stretched from the shore of the gulf across to where the steep foothills of Mount Kallidromo arose perhaps a hundred yards inland. It had a few gates in it, wide enough for carts to get through, which the Greeks had piled with rubble. The wall was perhaps eight feet tall from the front side, with rock and earth stepped up behind it so the Greeks could climb up to half its height. The ground further out in front of the wall was marshy, threaded through with small streams that ran from hot springs at the base of the mountain out across the beach and into the sea, making poor ground for attackers to advance across.
Rows of Greek archers crouched behind the wall, with armored foot soldiers behind them. The Greek forces stretched back for hundreds of yards along the coast, but their number was tiny compared to the enormous mass of men approaching from the Persian side.
Just out of bowshot, the Persians stopped. Commanders walked back and forth across the front lines, exhorting and directing their troops, and setting the final order of battle. Afterward, they retreated back into the mass of soldiers, and all was quiet for a moment.
The Greek army shouted their anger and defiance toward the Persians, who replied in kind. Indy could only hear a distant echo of that sound through her screen, conveyed through their spy-drones’ long-range microphones.
Long seconds later, the first arrows flew.
Thousands of Persian bowmen in the front ranks ran forward, knelt, and quickly loosed their shafts, sending a black river of arrows whistling toward the Greek army. Many of the Persians fell to Greek arrows shot from behind the wall, but more ran forward to take their places, and in a few moments the Greek archers had to take cover themselves or risk an arrow in the eye. At the same time, the front ranks of the Persian infantry broke into a fast trot toward the wall, their archers firing over their heads as they ran.
“Smart,” Themis said. “Try to close as much distance as they can under an arrow storm.”
And it was working. The Greek archers immediately behind the wall kept low and fired blindly over it at a high angle, trying to blunt the Persians’ charge, but without much effect. The Greeks further back raised their large shields to protect vulnerable flesh as arrows thudded into the ground around them.
Themis cringed as she saw a Greek soldier fall with an arrow through the eye-slit of his helmet. But most of the Greeks stood firm. Arrows were even bouncing off their armor here and there, which drew puzzled looks from some of the Greek soldiers.
A signal horn sounded from the Greek side, and just as the Persian soldiers broke into a run to close the last distance to the wall, the Greek archers rose from behind it and fired directly into their ranks.
The Persians charged desperately onward, but all throughout the masses of running men, hundreds of them fell in moments. Some tumbled limply, instantly struck dead by steel-tipped arrows fired at close range, and others lagged back behind the charge, grasping at arrows that had pierced their flesh, often directly through their armor.
“It’s working.” Argos’ ears twitched as Indy whispered, half-
disbelieving.
Miles away, the first wave of Persians crashed into the wall, scrabbling for purchase. Greek spearmen stood up from behind the wall, stabbing down into the mass of climbing men with deadly results. And now the full effect of Anna and Indy’s plan was finally apparent.
Their thousands of tiny fly-drones had spent the previous day touching down lightly all over the Persian army’s equipment, sparsely dusting any bronze or steel they could find with tiny nano-motes. Each mote could only penetrate a short distance before running out of energy, but they weakened the metal’s crystalline structure, working their way into existing flaws, deepening and widening them. And now, under heavy blows from undamaged Greek weapons, that weakened metal was crumbling and flaking away.
Indy saw Greek spear thrusts punch directly through shields and armor, which cracked and fell aside under the onslaught, leaving luckless Persian soldiers clad only in blood-soaked leather or cloth.
And Persian blows dealt against the Greeks had the opposite result. Persian spearheads exploded into shards when rammed into bronze shields, and sometimes blunted harmlessly or cracked even when they found cloth or flesh. In moments, the Persian front line was fighting with sticks against fully armored enemies with iron-tipped spears and arrows.
The slaughter was terrible. The Persians used their headless spear shafts like long staves, occasionally catching a Greek soldier a blow to the head and tumbling him from the wall to be trampled into the rocky ground. And some of the Persians still held intact weapons that had escaped the fly-drones’ attentions. But for the most part, the Persians were defenseless, and they fell by the hundreds.
Phaia looked up after a few queasy minutes of watching this carnage. “Say one thing for the Persians, those poor idiots aren’t backing down. Rather take my chances with the whips behind me.”
“But if they keep piling on, they can still run right over us,” Themis said.
It was true. The Persian dead were mounding up in front of the Greek wall, but the ranks behind them advanced over the bodies of their comrades like ants, keeping the pressure on the Greek defenders.
“Indy was right.” Melas held up his screen and pointed. “Xerxes is risking it all, right here. Look!”
Far back in the mass of the Persian army, a giant palanquin was pushing forward, borne by dozens of men and surrounded by Xerxes’ Immortals, an elite force of ten thousand heavily armed soldiers.
Indy belatedly noticed that Anna’s icon was right there on the palanquin beside those of Hylas and Xerxes. “Anna, are you all right?”
“Still good,” Anna’s reply came back immediately, translated from thought into speech by Indy’s collar net so the Greeks could hear it. “They just picked up this giant platform thing that we were all standing on, and they’re carrying us in the middle of the army.” Her voice sounded nervous, even in facsimile. “I think Xerxes wanted to get a closer look.”
The palanquin stopped well back from the fighting front, but still acted as a plug in the narrow stretch of land, stiffening the back of the Persian lines and pressing their men forward. The Greeks, even though they had been steadily rotating in fresh men to replace those who had tired or fallen, were wearing out. They didn’t have the endurance to grind up against a force so much larger than their own, even if they did have a huge advantage in weaponry.
“So where the hell are Leonidas and the Spartans?” Phaia scrolled around her screen. “I thought they might have been hanging back in reserve for a while, but I can’t see them anywhere.”
“Good question.” Indy’s collar lights flashed, and the viewpoint on her screen changed. The video shifted backward in time, tracking back to find when they had last seen Leonidas a few hours before. “Here they were at the beginning of battle,” she said. “Then it looks like they rotated further back during the fighting. Here’s where they are now.” She zoomed the viewpoint in, and Phaia leaned in to look at the bearded figure at their head.
“That’s not him.” Then Phaia looked closer. “He is wearing Leonidas’ armor and helmet. But that’s not his… face.” She smiled crookedly. “Definitely not.”
“So where is he?” Indy furiously thought commands into her collar’s net, trying to trace Leonidas’ location forward from the first time they had seen him.
Horns sounded from the Greek forces, and the Spartans, including the fake Leonidas, rose up and began to move to the front, tightening up into formation as they went. They clasped hands and slapped shoulders with the other Greeks as they went to join the fighting at the wall. Once formed up behind the wall, they waited until the horns sounded again.
This time, they were answered by the same horns, but from somewhere up in the hills, back past Xerxes’ palanquin.
The Spartans behind the wall charged forward in a tight wedge. Their comrades stepped aside, letting them climb up the low side of the wall and leap out onto the mounded bodies of the Persians on the other side. They ripped into the Persian forces, their steel swords taking a terrible toll on the all-but-defenseless Persians, whose long spear-poles were no protection against a close-in attack.
At the same time, in the rear of Xerxes’ elite guard, Persian heads were turning back toward the horn blasts, trying to figure out where they had come from.
“What are those horns behind us?” Anna’s synthesized voice asked. “Alixa says she can’t see what’s going on.”
“Hold on,” Indy said. “I’m moving one of the drones to get a better view.”
Gray areas on her screen filled in with detail, sweeping past Xerxes’ palanquin and back along the steep hills on the inland side of the narrow pass. There, out of a narrow gap in the hills, more Spartans streamed, quickly forming into a narrow wedge as they came. In moments, a force of perhaps three hundred men, looking desperately small compared to the huge mass of Persians, was running toward the enemy flank, aimed like a spear directly at Xerxes’ Immortals and the palanquin they surrounded.
“Leonidas located.” Alixa’s voice sounded from everyone’s phones, relayed the same way Anna’s was. All their screens changed to show the same view as Indy’s, and a little crown icon appeared above the head of the Spartan king at the point of the wedge.
“That’s where Leonidas got to,” Phaia said with satisfaction. “He must have swapped out his armor with some other Spartan.”
“And led a few soldiers up through the hill trails for a sneak attack, to try to take out Xerxes,” finished Themis. “That’s borderline suicidal, though. You’d get crushed by the bigger force, or shoved right back up the trail.”
“But with the Persians at such a disadvantage now…” Melas’ voice trailed off thoughtfully. He dialed his phone viewpoint in to observe the mass of the Persian military. “It will all depend on how the soldiers react.”
At first, the Persian ranks showed only mild confusion as they looked back and forth between the two Spartan horn signals. But then, as Leonidas’ men began cutting into the Persian flank, the screams of mortally wounded men filling the air, the Persians became restless, pushing one way and another, trying unsuccessfully to see what was going on.
A few moments later, the first Persian soldiers broke and ran.
Many of the spearmen retreating from the wall shoved back toward Xerxes’ elite force, trying fruitlessly to push them aside before splashing out across the marshy shore of the gulf to slog around them. Those under attack by Leonidas’ Spartans fled back toward the main mass of the Persian army, leaving fewer and fewer defenders between the oncoming Spartans and the Persian emperor.
In the space of a few minutes, a hard-fought battle had turned into a chaotic rout, with demoralized Persians streaming back from the wall and bypassing both Xerxes and Leonidas on their way to escape. Leonidas’ oncoming wedge of heavily armed warriors ignored the fleeing Persian soldiers, merely knocking them aside when necessary to advance toward the emperor.
But Xerxes was still surrounded by thousands of elite Immortals who showed no signs of panic. A huge man in elaborate gold-chased armor ran to the head of his men, gesturing powerfully toward them with a heavy staff and shouting something that their drones couldn’t pick up from this distance. Whatever he said, it rippled quickly through the Immortals, who began a deliberate advance directly toward Leonidas’ oncoming wedge.
“On the move.” Anna spoke tersely, as if she’d forgotten her friends were still listening. “Might have to go any second.”
“If Xerxes can break out,” Melas said, “he can withdraw behind the mass of his troops, and even with their weapons ineffective, we will never get to him.”
“I think Leonidas has something to say about that.” Phaia sounded pleased. “He’s aiming the Spartan wedge right at them. There’s not enough room for Xerxes to go around them on solid ground, and his elites’ armor is too heavy to go running through the mud out on the shore. Xerxes—” Her voice turned fearful as she remembered where Anna was. “Xerxes and Anna have to go right through them.”
Horns sounded again from behind the Greek wall, and the Boeotians and remaining Spartans began climbing over it, advancing quickly to engage the rear of the retreating Immortals. Greek weapons sheared through weakened Persian armor like brittle clay, cutting down dozens of men in moments. But with each Immortal that fell, another stepped forward to take his place and prevent Xerxes’ rear from being overrun.
At the new front of Xerxes’ formation, Leonidas’ men had been forced to spread out into a reinforced line, to keep the Persians from simply streaming around and enveloping them on their way to escape. The two sides met in straining, face-to-face combat, with the immense weight of the Persian force slowly pressing the Spartans back. The Persians were losing dozens of men for every Spartan who fell, but even so, the Spartans were being inexorably pushed aside.
But then the entire remaining Greek force came streaming over the wall, leaving nothing behind. Even heavily armed horsemen in elaborate armor charged right up to the wall before dismounting to climb slowly over it and attack the Persians on foot. And instead of joining the fight at Xerxes’ rear, the more lightly armed foot-soldiers skirted though the boggy marsh, out past the reach of Xerxes’ forces, and around to join and reinforce Leonidas’ line.
“Guys? It’s not looking good here.” Even synthesized, Anna’s voice sounded tense. “I’m about to do something really stupid. Just follow my lead.”
