Lawyers in Hell (55 page)

“No!” Kleomenes screamed.  “You put me there, you bastard!  You left me alone!  Alone in the dark!”

“No,
brother.”

“Enough!”  Menelaos’ voice crashed like thunder.  “Leonidas is right!  I see no murder here, Lykourgos!”

“Nor do I,” Agis said coldly.  Brasidas and Lysandros, too, murmured their assent.

The lawgiver, his face a mask of solemnity, nodded.  “We are agreed.  The accusation of murder holds no weight, and the witness you have borne is false, Kleomenes.  Willfully false!  There must be a reckoning with the Erinys!”

Leonidas held up a hand.  “Leniency, Ephors.  I ask for mercy.  Even in death, my brother is not right in his mind.”

“Mercy.”  Kleomenes’ shoulders sagged.  “Mercy for poor, mad Kleomenes.”  Then, quick as a darting serpent, the blood-stained apparition lunged at Leonidas; it looked as though the brothers would embrace
 –
until jags of light gleamed from the curved blade of a skinning knife streaking for Leonidas’ throat.  “Liar!” he howled.

Yet for all the madman’s speed, Leonidas was quicker, still.  He caught the wrist of Kleomenes’ knife-hand, twisted it, and mercilessly drove the bronze-rolled edge of his shield into his brother’s elbow.

Bone snapped.  Kleomenes howled in pain as the knife clattered from his nerveless fingers.

Leonidas shoved him away.

The madman fell into a crouch, clutching the injured limb to his breast.  He panted like a cornered animal, eyes darting as he sought an avenue of escape.

“That was necessary, brother,” Leonidas said.  “To keep you from hurting yourself further.”  He took a step toward Kleomenes…

…who screamed an incoherent curse and sprinted for the temple doors, barreling through Simonides.  The poet fell heavily.  The shadows exploded in rustling and clashing, hissing in rage.  Menelaos and the other ephors leapt to their feet.

They might have given chase had Leonidas not stayed them with an upraised hand.  “He is my responsibility.  I will fetch him back so you may pass judgment on him.  Even now, after this, I still ask for mercy.  Do not set the Erinys on him!”

“We will see,” Lykourgos said.  “Bring him back and we will see.”

Leonidas nodded.  “Dienekes?”

The other veteran of Thermopylae, who had been helping Simonides to his feet, looked around at the temple doors and the silhouette of Kleomenes, who seemed to have paused on the temple’s threshold and was hesitating.

Dienekes gauged distances.  “I can catch him easily enough.”

“Come, then.”

But before either man could get off the mark, Agis called them up short.  “Wait.  Look.  He returns of his own volition.”

True enough:  Kleomenes had stood there a moment more, limned by hellish light, then turned and staggered back in the direction of the ephors.  He made an eerie mewling sound, like a wet sob.  His broken arm hung slack; with his good hand he plucked at his throat.

“Kleomenes, my poor brother!”  Leonidas walked toward him.  “Let us be reconciled.  Here, no doubt, we can find good uses for your madness.”

Kleomenes sagged at the edge of the clerestory light filtering down from above.  Leonidas reached him before he could topple and eased him to the tiled floor.  The madman could not speak.  Gouts of bright red blood cascaded from Kleomenes’ mouth.  Standing out a hand-span from his throat, Leonidas saw the ragged black fletching of an arrow.

And in that one galvanizing instant he forgot his dead brother.  “Dienekes, outside!”

In tandem, the two Spartans bolted for the temple doors.  The ephors followed suit, with Simonides and Lykourgos struggling to bring up the rear.  The shadows around and above seethed with sound
 –
a cacophony of shrieking, flapping, hissing, and scraping matched only by the howls and screams that bled in from outside.

The younger man reached the threshold first.  “Zeus Savior,” Dienekes muttered.

Beyond the temple doors, Leonidas beheld a scene of raw and bloody chaos.  Caeadas was under attack.  A horde of misshapen figures boiled over the distant edge of the plateau
 –
grotesque caricatures of humanity, their filthy limbs askew or missing, their faces snarling and deformed.  Some staggered on stumps of legs, others trotted on three, and still others ran on all fours like feral beasts.  Leonidas saw an Athenian advocate savaged by a pair of thin, childlike creatures wielding daggers.  A Cretan hero tried to intervene only to be split nigh asunder by an ogreish thing with an axe strapped to its sole arm.  An instant later, a Nubian sent a bone-tipped spear straight into the ogre’s gaping maw, then fell under a swarm of jackal-like figures.  And at the edges of the fray, archers capered and loosed a hail of black-feathered shafts, their powerful bows sending the arrows arching over the heads of the combatants and into the ranks of those fleeing their advance.

“The
Ataphoi
!”  Leonidas heard Simonides gasp.  “Someone’s armed them!”

An arrow shattered on the temple steps; another rang off Dienekes’ shield
 –
doubtless from the same contingent of archers who skewered Kleomenes.

Lykourgos’ iron-shod staff of office sparked as he rapped it on the marble floor.  “Close the doors!  Let them waste their strength against those below!”

“No!” Leonidas replied, coldly.  “If you be men of war, come with me!”

With that, the dead king of Sparta turned and stalked down the temple steps, Dienekes at his side.  Brasidas, Lysandros, Menelaos, and Agis fanned out at his back, leaving Simonides and Lykourgos alone.

Poet stared at lawgiver.

Lykourgos tried to disguise his fear beneath a snarl of contempt:  “Fools!  Help me close the doors, Simonides.”

Shaking his head, Simonides of Keos hurried to join Leonidas.

On the stairs they met a pair of Spartans coming to meet them
 –
one was young and wounded, an arrow jutting from the small of his back; the other was older, sightless even in Hades, and he held his companion up and covered them both with the bowl of his shield.

“Eurytus,” Leonidas said.

“We were coming to warn you when young Maron, here, took one in the spine.”  Blind Eurytus moved his shield slightly to catch another incoming arrow.  It struck the bronze face like a mallet striking a bell, causing the Spartan to wince.  Leonidas reckoned he could hear the wind rushing past each arrow’s fletching.

Though unable to walk, Maron smiled.  “I’ll be all right, my king!  I can still skewer the bastards!”

Leonidas nodded.  “Rest, lad.  There will be plenty of killing to do in a few moments.  Simonides!”  The poet hustled to his side.  Leonidas clapped a hand on his shoulder.  “Take charge of the wounded.  Keep them safe.  Eurytus, here, will help you.”  Simonides took the injured Spartan’s arm and helped him sit as their blind comrade provided cover.

Leonidas turned his attention to the ephors, noting Lykourgos’ absence.  “Agis, kinsman, take the left flank.  Noble Menelaos, you have the right.  Brasidas, you and Lysandros are with me in the center.”  The ephors, the Chosen of Persephone, did Leonidas’ bidding without complaint.

At the first hint of trouble, the Spartans had performed the task for which they had been bred, arraying themselves in a tight phalanx one hundred shields long and three deep.  Now, they waited only for their king.  Despite an enemy surging toward them, baying like wolves, Leonidas paused to speak to a few of his men; he strolled through their ranks as though they stood on a parade field, taking his Corinthian helmet from a squire even as he told a rude joke.  Laughter rippled along the formation.  The crest of Leonidas’ helmet was bright scarlet—a splash of color amid the ash and grime of war.

His battle priest, stern-eyed Aristandros, waited at the center of the formation, clutching a kneeling captive by the hair.  Here, they had no goats to sacrifice, no oxen to offer the gods.  Here, they had only the shades of the dead.  This one was a slave snatched at the last minute.  Simonides’ salpinx-bearer, Leonidas noted.  No matter.  He would serve their purpose.

Leonidas grasped an eight-foot long spear and thrust it aloft.

“Spartans!” he roared.  All eyes turned toward him.  “Lord Hades is our master, now!  He has given us these dregs, these wretched
Ataphoi
, on which to whet our spears!  They are not worthy of this honor, but Lord Hades’ will must be done!  There is no Glory, here!  There is no Glory in the killing of such miserable creatures!  There is only Mercy!  Come, my Spartans!  Come, my ferocious Three Hundred!  Show our enemy the Mercy of the Spear!  All of this for you, Lord Hades and for Lakedaemon!”  With little effort, he drove the blade of his spear through the slave’s body.  Blood spattered the packed earth, hissing on naked rock.  The omens were good.

“For Lord Hades!  For Lakedaemon!” his men echoed.  “And for Leonidas!”

“Advance!”

Pipers played a tune on their reed flutes as the hoplites stepped off in unison, spears upright, their strides precise and unbroken.  Polished greaves and shield-faces flashed in the infernal light.  Three hundred throats chanted the
paean
, a hymn to Hades:

“Theos Khthonios,

“Pitiless in heart,

“Dweller under the Earth…”

At stanza’s end, Leonidas bellowed a command:  “Spears!”  And with that the bristling hedge of iron dropped from vertical to horizontal, creating a threshing machine of slaughter.

Now fifty yards’ distant, the savage
Ataphoi
only increased their pace.  They charged like a mindless mob, in knots and clusters that held no cohesion, moving as fast or as slow as their deformed limbs allowed.  They did not spread out and try to envelop the Spartan line, but drove straight at their center, at the scarlet crest that marked Leonidas.  Their archers drew and loosed with reckless abandon … and to no avail.

The heavy bronze armor of the Spartans shrugged off this barbed rain of arrows.  The Three Hundred marched on, implacable.

Behind them came the battle squires and helots, joined by the folk of different nations allied against the
Ataphoi
.  From their ranks came a barrage of javelins, arrows, and sling stones that scythed into the unarmored mass of the enemy.

Howls of rage turned to agony; blood spewed as riddled bodies flopped to the ground under the rain of Spartan missiles, where the heels of their fellow
Ataphoi
kicked and trampled them into the dust
.

A dozen yards separated them, now.  Leonidas saw a festering mass of creatures, the cast-offs and detritus of a thousand years of natural selection.  The things barreling toward him could never have survived in the sunlit world of the living:  they were denizens of nightmare, seething with jealousy and hate.

Ten yards.  Eight.  Six….

Leonidas braced his shield, its rim scraping that of Dienekes’ on his right.  Aristandros was on his left.  Knowing his brothers, his kinsmen, his friends stood in such close proximity filled Leonidas’ heart with joy.  He sang the paean:

Theos Khthonios!

Five yards, now.  Four….

He singled out his first target:  a naked, spitting thing with a misshapen head, sword clutched like a stick of driftwood in its gnarled fist. 
No Glory, only Mercy
.  Leonidas lined up his spear with the wretch’s center of mass.  A swift blow, through the spine…

Three yards.  Two….

Seconds before impact, through the eye-slit of his Corinthian helmet, Leonidas watched the front ranks of
Ataphoi
convulse.  Perhaps their dull brains felt the first tendrils of fear; perhaps the prospect of facing an unbroken wall of bronze suddenly daunted them.  Whatever the reason, their steps faltered and their braying slacked off, replaced by a keening dirge of dread.  But their close-packed ranks could not turn aside.  Momentum drove them into the flesh-grinding teeth of the Spartan war machine.

They struck with the sound of a melon meeting an anvil, a wet crack that drowned out the screams and the song and echoed over the plateau of Caeadas.  Leonidas’ spear licked out, taking his first victim high, in the throat.  Blood gushed from the hideous wound as the thing toppled backward….

Suddenly, Leonidas’ field of vision became a wall of writhing flesh, reeking of sulphur and feces and rich red gore.  Sheer numbers pressed in upon him….

A sword bites low and deep, slipping between bronze and leather to skewer his hip.  He stumbles.  The enemy surges forward.  A misshapen arm catches him off balance; a second sword shatters on the brow of his Corinthian helmet.  “Theos Khthonios!” he bellows; faces loom over him—cruel-eyed
Ataphoi
with curled talons and blood-blasted fangs, lips peeled back in snarls of hate.  They will pay dearly for this.  Oh, yes!  They will pay the butcher’s bill, a hecatomb of blood and flesh for every Spartan, Lord Hades!  He falls to his knees, hears a deep voice whisper his name:  “Leonidas.”

Time slows.  He is at the Hot Gates, again.  At hallowed Thermopylae.  A tracery of clouds veil the face of the sun, creating bands of light and shadow across the stony face of Mount Kallidromos.  He is not alone.  A figure helps him arise.  The Spartan sees a tall and perfectly formed being towering over him, his visage dark and brooding.

Lord Hades.

“Leonidas,” the Lord of the Underworld says, in a voice pitched to such sweet perfection that the dead king of Sparta must fight back tears.  “You are mine, now, and you have served me well.  Go, and serve me still:  henceforth you are my champion, the Chosen of Hades!  Remember your oath!”

Time’s flow resumes with a scream of rage.

Roaring, Leonidas surged upward.  He flung creatures aside, bones snapping as his shield slammed into their faces, into their torsos.  Though he bled from a wound in his hip, the dead king of Sparta was indomitable; his spear moved like a living thing, darting and biting.  With each strike, another deformed shade lost its semblance of life.  Blood slimed the stones, and steam rose from fresh pools of gore to wrap Leonidas in an infernal cloak.