Surely no one could have resisted such a moment. As I stepped into the firelight, I announced, 'The gods say otherwise, Pasicrates.'
Unable to recall my past, I cannot say whether it has held many such culminations, but I doubt it. To see these men, so hard, so strong, so prideful in their hardness and their strength, with their mouths gasping like children washed the last fatigue from me.
I said, 'You were permitted to throw me so that I might speak with a certain Nereid. Thoe is her name. Now I have returned, ready to resume our match. When the others wrestled, it was for three falls-not one.'
For an instant there was a hush so complete the crackling of the fire on the altar seemed the burning of a city. Far up the mountain they call Kallidromos, a lion roared. At the sound the men of Rope roared too, so many and so loud as to silence the waves and the grieving wind.
Before their shout died, Pasicrates and I were locked more tightly than any lovers. I knew his strength then, and he knew mine. He sought to lift me, but I held him too tightly, and slowly, slowly, I bent him back. I could have broken him then if I had wished, snapping his spine as a soldier mad for blood seizes his enemy's spear and breaks it; but I was not mad for blood, only for victory. I threw him to the ground instead.
Io rushed forward, laughing like a lark, with a jar of wine and a rag for my face. A Rope Maker did the same for Pasicrates. Another, perhaps a year or two older, asked, 'What of the sacrifice? Surely this is sacrilege.'
Pasicrates answered, 'We give our might to Leonidas, just as might was offered to Patroklos. The winner will complete the sacrifice.'
When we closed again, his strength was twice what it had been. For what seemed a whole night we strove together, but I could not throw him, nor could he throw me.
There came a moment when my face was to the fire, and he met my gaze. The lion roared again, nearer now, and loud as a war horn over the shouting of the men from Rope. Pasicrates stiffened. 'There's a lion in your eyes,' he gasped.
'And a boy in yours,' I told him; and lifting him over my head, I carried him away from the altar until the waves licked at my ankles, and I cast him into the sea. The lion roared a third time. I have not heard it since.
CHAPTER XXXVII-Leonidas, Lion of Rope
'Hear our prayer,' I intoned, dressed again in the chiton Io had kept for me, crowned with a few wildflowers and girded with my belt of manhood. 'Accept our homage!' Moved by I cannot say what spirit, I added, 'We do not ask for victory, but for courage.' With that I cast the bullock's fat and heart into the fire, and the men from Rope sang a marching song.
The sacrifice was complete. Half a dozen slaves fell upon the bullock and hewed it to bits with knives and hatchets. Soon everyone had a stick with a gobbet of meat at the end of it. There was wine too, barley bread, hard cheese, salt olives, raisins, and dried figs.
Io said, 'This is the best meal we've had since we've been with these awful people, Latro. You're lucky you don't remember what we've been eating.'
'This is good enough for me,' I told her. I was so hungry I had to force myself to chew, so as not to choke on the meat.
'For me too. But don't ever, ever try their soup. We have, and if somebody was going to pour that soup down my throat I'd cut it first.' She went to the carcass and got another bit of flesh to put on her stick. 'This is as good as dining with Kalleos, and I don't know anything nicer you can say about a meal than that. If you want some more meat, though, you'd better get it. There isn't much left.'
I shook my head. 'I'll have something else. Meat alone upsets the digestion.'
Io giggled. 'And to think Drakaina's missing it.'
'She is? Where is she?'
'Still on the ship.' Io pointed toward the bay, where our ship rode at anchor in the moonlight. 'Pasicrates thought the reason you never came up was that she'd put a spell on you. Or anyway, that's what he said he thought. If you ask me he was looking for somebody to blame, and he picked the right party. So she's back there with her hands tied behind her and a clout over her mouth so she can't work any more magic.'
'I must speak to him about that,' I told her.
With what remained of my loaf in my hand, I went to the fire at which he sat and seated myself beside him, saying, 'Greetings, most noble Pasicrates.'
'Ah,' he said. 'The victor. Yet a slave. Still a slave. I should not have demeaned myself, and the gods have punished me for it.'
'As you say. You are our commander, the master of our ship and all on board. But if I'm a slave, I no longer recall whose. Your servant-I will not say your slave-has come to beg you to release the woman called Drakaina. She's done me no harm today. Has she harmed you?'
'No,' he said. 'We'll free her in the morning.'
'Then let me swim to the ship, and I'll tell the watch you've ordered her freed.'
He looked at me quizzically. 'You'd swim there yourself, if I permitted it?'
'Certainly.'
'Then you won't have to.' He turned to one of his companions. 'Take the boat and a couple of seamen, and tell them to free the woman. Bring her back with you.'
The man nodded, rose, and vanished into the night.
'As for you, Latro, I want you to come with me. Do you know what this place is?'
I said, 'They call it the Hot Gates, but I don't know why. Since we sacrificed to Leonidas, I suppose he's a hero and that he's buried here.'
'He was,' Pasicrates told me. 'Our people dug up his body-what they could find of it-and sent it back to Rope. It had been hacked to bits.' He spat. 'The Great King paraded Leonidas's head on a spear.'
As we walked on, I asked him what it was I smelled. It was like the stench of a bad egg, but so strong it overpowered even the tang of the sea.
'The springs. They boil out of the ground, not pure and cold like other springs, but steaming and reeking, sickening to drink and yet a cure for many ills. Or so I've been told. This is my first visit to this place, but they say in Rope that's why it's called the Hot Gates-it's the way to those boiling springs.'
'Is that where we're going?' I asked him.
'No, only to the ruined wall. My men and I went to look at it by daylight, before you came out of the sea. Now I want to show it to you, and tell you what happened here. You'll forget, but I've begun to think that's because you're the ear of the gods; they hear, instead of you, or they take the memory of what you've heard from you. This is something the gods should know.'
'There it is.' I pointed. 'Where that man sits combing his hair.' I could see him plainly in the moonlight, naked and muscular, plowing his long dark locks with a comb of pale shell.
'You see a man dressing his hair?'
'Yes,' I said. 'And another-now he throws a discus. But this can't be the wall you're looking for. It isn't ruined.'
Pasicrates told me, 'Those must be ghosts you see. Here Leonidas and his Rope Makers exercised their bodies before the battle and readied them for burial. You and I are alone, and the wall lies in ruins before us. The Great King destroyed it so his host could pass.'
I said, 'Then Leonidas was killed, and the army of your city destroyed.'
'He had no army, only three hundred Rope Makers, a few thousand slaves-he was the first to arm them-and a thousand or so unreliable allies. But the judges had instructed him to hold this road around Kallidromos, and he held it for three days against the Great King's host, until he and every man who'd stayed with him were dead. The Great King counted three millions all told, about half of them real fighting men and the rest mule drivers and the like.'
'Surely that's impossible,' I said. 'Such a small force could never defend this place against so many.'
'So the Great King thought.' Pasicrates turned suddenly to face me. 'That was a tear, I think, that struck my hand. You're no Rope Maker, Latro. Why do you weep?'
