I stood in the crowd before the Hellenion with Alexandras and the other boys of the training platoons, the women and children, the whole city drawn up beneath the acacias and cypresses, singing the hymn to Castor, as the regiments trooped out along the Going-Away Street with their shields slung and spears at the slope, helmets lashed athwart the shoulders of their crimson cloaks, bobbing atop their polemothylakioi, the battle packs which the Peers bore now for show but which, like their armor, would be transferred, with all kit save spears and swords, to the shoulders of their squires when the army assumed column of march and stripped for the long, dusty hump north.

Alexandras' beautiful broken face remained a mask as Dienekes strode into view, flanked by his squire, Suicide, at the head of his platoon of the Herakles lochos. The main body of troops passed on. Leading and accompanying each regiment trudged the pack animals laden with the supplies of the commissariat and thwacked merrily on the rumps by the switches of their helot herd boys. The train of armament waggons passed next, already obscured within a churning storm of road dust; then followed the tall victualry waggons with their cargo of oil pots and wine jars, sacks of figs, olives, leeks, onions, pomegranates and the cooking pots and ladles swinging on hooks beneath them, banging into each other musically in the dust of the mules' tread, contributing a ringing metronomic air to the cacophony of cracking whips and squalling wheel rims, teamsters' bawls and groaning axles.

Behind the provisions bearers came the portable forges and armorers' kits with their spare xiphos blades and butt-spikes, lizard-stickers and long iron spear blades, then the spare eight-footers, uncured ash and cornel shafts lashed lengthwise along the waggon rails. Helot armorers strode in the cloud alongside, clad in their dogskin caps and aprons, forearms crisscrossed with the burn scars of the smithy.

Last of all trooped the sacrificial goats and sheep, with their horns wrapped and leashes held by the helot herd urchins, led by Dekton in his already road-begrimed altar-boy white, trailering a haltered ass laden with feed grain and two victory roosters in cages, one on either side of the cargo frame. He grinned when he passed, a little flash of contempt escaping his otherwise impeccably pious demeanor.

I was deep into slumber that night, on the stone of the portico behind the ephorate, when I felt a hand shake me awake. It was Agathe, the Spartan girl who had made Alexandras' charm to Polyhymnia. Get up, you! she hissed, so as not to alert the score of other youths of the agoge asleep and on watch around these public buildings. I blinked around. Alexandras, who had been asleep beside me, was gone. Hurry!

The girl melted at once into shadow. I followed her swiftly through the dark streets to that copse of the double-holed myrtle they called Dioscuri, the Twins, just west of the start of the Little Ring.

Alexandras was there. He had snuck away from his platoon without me (which would have put both of us, if caught, in line for a merciless whipping). He stood now, wearing his black pais' cloak and battle pack, confronted by his mother, the lady Paraleia, one of their male house helots and his two younger sisters. Hard words flew. Alexandras intended to follow the army to battle.

I'm going, he declared. Nothing will stop me.

I was ordered by Alexandras' mother to knock him down.

I saw something flash in his fist. His xyele, the sicklelike weapon all the boys carried. The women saw it too, and the deadly-grim look in the lad's eye. For a long moment, every form froze. The preposterousness of the situation was becoming more and more apparent, as was the adamantine resolution of the boy.

His mother straightened before him.

Go, then, the lady Paraleia addressed her son at last. She didn't need to add that I would go with him. And may God preserve you in the lashing you receive when you return.

It was not hard to follow the army. The track along the Oenous was churned to dust, ankle-deep.

At Selassia the perioikic Stephanos regiment had joined the expedition. Alexandros and I, arriving in the dark, could still make out the trodden-bare marshaling ground and the freshly dried blood upon the altar where the sacrifices had been performed and the omens taken. The army itself was half a day ahead; we could not stop for sleep, but pushed on all night.

At dawn we came upon men we recognized. A helot armorer named Eukrates had broken his leg in a fall and was being helped home by two of his fellows. He informed us that at the frontier fort of Oion fresh intelligence had reached Leonidas. The Antirhionians, far from rolling over and playing dead as the king had hoped, had sent envoys in secret, appealing for aid to the tyrannos Gelon in Sikelia. Gelon could appreciate as well as Leonidas and the Persians the strategic indispensability of the port of Antirhion; he wanted it too. Forty Syrakusan ships bearing two thousand citizen and mercenary heavy infantry were on their way to reinforce the Antirhionian defenders. It would be a real battle after all.

The Spartan force pressed on through Tegea. The Tegeates, member allies of the Peloponnesian League and obligated to follow the Spartans whithersoever they should lead, reinforced the army with six hundred of their own heavy infantry, swelling its fighting total to beyond four thousand. Leonidas had not been seeking parataxis, a pitched battle, with the Antirhionians.

Rather he had hoped to overawe them with a show of such force that they would perceive the folly of defiance and enroll themselves of their own free will in the alliance against the Persians.

Among Dekton's herd was a wrapped bull, brought in anticipation of celebration, of festive sacrifice in honor of this new addition to the League. But the Antirhionians, perhaps bought by Gelon's gold, inflamed by the rhetoric of some glory-hungry demagogue or betrayed by a lying oracle, had chosen to make a fight of it.

When Alexandros spoke to the helots on the road, he had queried them for intelligence on the specific makeup of the Syrakusan forces: which units, under which commanders, reinforced by which auxiliaries. The helots didn't know. In any army other than the Spartan, such ignorance would have provoked a fierce tongue-lashing or worse. Yet Alexandros let it go without a thought.

Among the Lakedaemonians, it is considered a matter of indifference of whom and in what the enemy consists.

The Spartans are schooled to regard the foe, any foe, as nameless and faceless. In their minds it is the mark of an ill-prepared and amateur army to rely in the moments before battle on what they call pseudoandreia, false courage, meaning the artificially inflated martial frenzy produced by a general's eleventh-hour harangue or some peak of bronze-banging bravado built to by shouting, shield-pounding and the like. In Alexandros' mind, which already at age fourteen mirrored that of the generals of his city, one Syrakusan was as good as the next, one enemy strategos no different from another. Let the foe be Mantinean, Olynthian, Epidaurian; let him come in elite units or hordes of shrieking rabble, crack citizen regiments or foreign mercenaries hired for gold. It made no difference. None was a match for the warriors of Lakedaemon, and all knew it.

Among the Spartans the work of war is demystified and depersonalized through its vocabulary, which is studded with references both agrarian and obscene. Their word which I translated earlier as fuck, as in the youths' tree-fucking, bears the connotation not so much of penetration as of grinding, like a miller's stone. The front three ranks fuck or mill the enemy. The verb to kill, in Doric theros, is the same as to harvest. The warriors in the fourth through sixth ranks are sometimes called harvesters, both for the work they do on the trampled enemy with the butt-spike lizard-stickers of their eight-footers and for that pitiless threshing stroke they make with the short xiphos sword, which itself is often called a reaper. To decapitate a man is to top him off or give him a haircut. Chopping off a hand or arm is called limbing.