Free Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield Page B

daisy-chopper on his hip.
    â€œI went for him. He met me with his shield as a weapon, swinging it, edge-on like an axe. His first blow splintered my own shield. I had my eight-footer by the haft, trying to uppercut him, but he splintered the shaft clean through with a second blow. I was now bronze-naked in front of this demon. He swung that shield like a relish plate. Took me right here, square above the eye sockets.
    â€œI could feel the crown of the helmet tear up and off, shearing half my skull with it. The bottom lip of the eyehole had opened the muscles beneath the brow, so that my left eye was sheeted with blood.
    â€œI had that helpless feeling you get when you’re wounded, when you know it’s bad but you don’t know how bad, you think you may be dead already but you’re not sure. Everything is happening slowly, as in a dream. I was down on my face. I knew this giant was over me, aiming some blow to send me to hell.
    â€œSuddenly he was there beside me. My brother. I saw him take a step and sling his
xiphos
like a throwing blade. It hit this Corinthian Gorgon right below the nose; the iron smashed the fellow’s teeth, blew right through the bone of the jaw and into his throat, lodging there with the grip sticking out before his face.”
    Dienekes shook his head and released a dark chuckle, the kind one summons recalling a tale at a distance, knowing how close he had come to annihilation and in awe before the gods that he had somehow survived. “It didn’t even slow this dick-stroker down. He came right back at Iatrokles, with bare hands and that pig-poker buried square in his jaw. I took him low and my brother took him high. We dropped him like a wrestler. I drove the blade end of my eight-footer that was now a one-footer into his guts, then grabbed the butt-spike end of someone’s discarded eight from the dirt and laid all my weight on it, right through his groin all the way into the ground, nailing him there. My brother had grabbed the bastard’s sword and hacked half the top of his head off, right through the bronze of his helmet. He still got up. I had never seen my brother truly terrified but this time it was serious. ‘Zeus Almighty!’ he cried, and it was not a curse but a prayer, a piss-down-your-leg prayer.”
    The night had grown cool; my master draped his cloak around his shoulders. He took another draught of wine.
    â€œHe had a squire, my brother did, from Antaurus in Scythia, of whom you may have heard. This man was called by the Spartans ‘Suicide.’”
    My expression must have betrayed startlement, for Dienekes chuckled in response. This fellow, the Scythian, had been Dienekes’ squire before me; he became my own mentor and instructor. It was all new to me, however, that the man had served my master’s brother before him.
    â€œThis reprobate had come to Sparta like you, Xeo, on his own, the crazy bastard. Fleeing bloodguilt, a murder; he had killed his father or father-in-law, I forget which, in some hill-tribe dispute over a girl. When he arrived in Lakedaemon, he asked the first man he met to dispatch him, and scores more for days. No one would do it, they feared ritual pollution; finally my brother took him with him to battle, promising he’d get him polished off there.
    â€œThe man turned out a holy terror. He wouldn’t keep to the rear like the other squires, but waded right in, unarmored, seeking death, crying out for it. His weapon, as you know, was the javelin; he crafted his own, sawed-off specimens no longer than a man’s arm, which he called ‘darning needles.’ He carried twelve of them, in a quiver like arrows, and threw them by the clutch of three, one after the other, at the same man, saving the third for the close work.”
    This indeed described the man. Even now, what must be twenty years later, he remained fearless to the point of madness and utterly reckless of his