The Ten Thousand (10 page)

Thus my first contact with Asteria, a girl who could read Homer, and who was to have such an impact on the rest of my life. Had I entered Cyrus' tent twenty minutes before or later, or had I not peered curiously into the dark corner, it is entirely possible I never would have looked into those kohl-lined eyes. So much of the future hangs upon the most ephemeral of webs spun by the Fates, the remote likelihood that one of a thousand possible results will be chosen by the deities. If a man were ever able to unravel such threads, he would have finally solved the mystery of the universe and attained the wisdom of the gods. In so doing, however, he would be struck down by those very deities in defense of their existence, as was Icarus upon approaching the sun.

Perhaps it is best to resolve not even to try to unravel those threads; but such resignation flies in the face of one's own humanity. It is a quandary.

OUR DEPARTURE FROM Sardis on the ninth day of March was splendid, a day of sunshine and confidence, and the entire city turned out along the route to view the spectacle. The men began marching at first light, and by midday not even half the enormous army had taken to the road yet. The tremendous cloud of dust raised by the tramping feet obscured the sun so that no one could see the entire army in a glance, but watching the thousands upon thousands of solemn faces as the troops passed by in their wide columns gave sufficient indication of power as to impress even the gods. Only Clearchus and his most recently recruited troops were absent, as they would be joining us later on the march.

The procession was led by long trains of surly pack camels, followed by herds of goat and sheep for the daily sacrifices, to obtain the gods' favor before battle and hazardous river crossings. These were followed by big-eyed, lowing oxen trailing enormous wagons laden with the troops' heavy equipment and supplies. The animals' early lead would allow them and the gear to arrive at the daily campsites first and begin seeking forage, and would allow the quartermaster's slaves to start setting up tents and cook sites for the arriving troops. The oxen were followed by forty elephants, which Cyrus had acquired from Indian traders. They were the first such beasts I had ever seen, and were fearsome, seemingly holdovers from the age of the Titans. They stood as tall as a small tree and were hairless and wrinkled, from a distance appearing to have a tail at both ends. If one didn't know better, they would seem to be walking backwards, although I soon learned that the large, flapping ears were a reasonably accurate indicator as to the location of the head. These creatures, however, were merely for show during the grand departure from Sardis. The forage they would have required would have been too difficult to support during a normal march, so after the grand review was finished, Cyrus ordered them to be circled back to the city to continue assisting in the construction of its defensive works.

Cyrus' native troops followed next: a hundred thousand Persians, Lydians, Egyptians and even Ethiopians, bedecked in their own country's armor and clothing, each with their individual drummers and pipers to keep the marching feet in rhythm, their native officers shouting orders in barbaric tongues. The pennants and standards of the native brigades flew proudly, and each unit tried to outdo the others during this lead march out of Sardis before the prince's watchful eyes.

Behind the infantry, led by the prince himself, rode the Persian cavalry, thousands of identical white Arabian stallions, prancing and snorting, their proud riders sitting erect and motionless, wearing pointed bronze helmets and chain mail that glittered in the sun like the squamae of fish. Surrounding them were ranks of pantalooned Medes marching in perfect precision, bearing gilded and bejeweled lances topped with silken banners woven in the form of dragons; as the breeze blew through their gaping jaws, they seemed to hiss with rage, their long tails fluttering behind them on the wind. Following the cavalry, in the place of honor usually reserved for the general's bodyguard, came the proud Greeks, marching in unison, their scarlet cloaks fluttering in the breeze and the long, oiled braids of the Spartans among them carefully dressed and flowing down their backs. It would have been wonderful to roll out a walking display of Proxenus' Boeotian engines, but the crowd was too pressing for it to be safe, and Clearchus, who detested the machines in any case, had vetoed any discussion of the matter among his captains, even during his temporary absence. Proxenus and Xenophon, along with the other officers, rode alongside the columns of marching troops, though not so much to keep them in order as to keep the crowds contained. So enthused were the onlookers by this time that it was difficult to restrain the women and girls from flitting into the columns to plant kisses on the men's faces, or the male bystanders from thumping our Greeks stoutly on the shoulders in a jubilant display of well-wishing and hope for success against the upstart Pisidians. Following close behind were Cyrus' six hundred cavalry bodyguard, his "Immortals," in demeanor and discipline every bit as fearsome as the Greeks. These men were hand-picked from every nation under Persian dominion, but were uniformed and armed identically, and had been trained for years to serve no personal desire and to favor no master before their duty of protecting Cyrus. They were somewhat put out at having to march behind the Greeks in the army's column, but during the course of the next few months, Clearchus made special efforts to ingratiate himself with them, as far, at least, as he was capable, given his lack of social skills. Eventually the Greeks and Cyrus' Immortals gained a grudging respect for each other.

The rear of the column consisted of more native infantry and the army's twenty "scythe chariots," the curved blades on their hubs sheathed for safety but still cutting ominously through the air, to the delight of the crowd and the utter disdain of the Spartans, who loathed any such gimmickry. Behind this was Cyrus' personal retinue, an enormous mob: the quartermaster general, with his ninety subalterns, responsible for billeting and feeding the troops; a company of haughty horsemen, couriers for the prince and the senior officers; and carriages bearing dozens of Persian seers, priests and their assistants. They were accompanied by an equal number of vehicles loaded with their supplies: lavish robes and other garments, ceremonial knives, chalices, incense, scrolls, and vessels. Next were the covered wagons bearing the royal wardrobes, which despite their size were dwarfed by those bearing the wardrobes of the Persian generals, much to the scoffing and hilarity of the Greeks. The importance of the marchers and goods declined rapidly from this point: fifty empty carriages and wagons used for reserve, an entire herd of unmounted horses, each led by a Persian boy in pantaloons and slippers, and an unending parade of vehicles reserved for the prince's concubines, valets, physicians, barbers, footmen, apothecaries, scribes, porters, tailors, laundry women, the head cook and his fourteen assistants, the prince's taster and two replacement tasters, engineers, historians—one's head spins.

After this came the real show—the enormous, straggling, jeering and cheering crowd of camp followers—leather tanners, con artists, prostitutes, water sellers, musicians, jugglers, seamstresses, money changers, laundry women, wives and children of the soldiers themselves, and a horde of beggars and tramps trailing behind, a complete representation of the entire lower strata of Persian and Greek society, a veritable city of thousands, half again as many as the soldiers themselves, who made their living serving and fleecing the army by day and entertaining it by night, or perhaps the other way around. They were despised by the officers and army regulars, but ultimately tolerated and even protected, because otherwise the services they provided would have to be rendered by the troops themselves, and trained fighting men were too valuable to be wasted on mundane camp tasks.

I shall not go into excessive detail regarding the daily progress of our march. For the most part the routine was uneventful. Cyrus had arranged for sufficient provisions from the outset, so we were not dependent upon foraging from the countryside as we passed through. Consequently, our arrival in each city and village was not feared by the inhabitants, but was instead an occasion for cautious celebration. The prince traveled with an ever-present chest of copper coins, which he would toss in handfuls to the crowds on either side, with the expansive gestures of a benevolent father. The crowds would mill frantically around the caravan, competing with the native company of beggars from Sardis, and create an uproar as they scrambled in the dust for the tiny coins that became trampled underfoot. Cyrus and his minions rode past, solemn, imperious, only the occasional tight-lipped smile breaking the gravity of their demeanor, watching as their subjects rolled in the filth at the feet of their horses.

Thus we traveled steadily eastward across the length of Asia Minor, in good weather and order, the men challenged every day by Cyrus' insistence on readiness and drilling, and by daily inspections of our equipment and weapons. We tramped straight into the heart of Pisidia—though contrary to our expectations of battle and plunder, we fired not a single arrow nor captured any enemy territory. The prince disdainfully ignored the barbarian warriors lined up warily along the ridge tops, watching our enormous trains of baggage, our servants, and our camp followers in awe. Five weeks into the march, we stopped at one of the Great King's palaces on the River Meander, which we used for a month as a way station to regroup and retrain, and to resettle the baggage. It was here, legend has it, that Apollo punished the leering satyr Marsyas, who had challenged the god to a music match. Apollo played his lyre upside-down and demanded that Marsyas match this feat with his flute, which of course he was unable to do. After flaying the foolish satyr alive, Apollo hung his skin on the wall of a nearby cave, whence comes the source of a small but wild local river fittingly named the Marsyas.

It was here, too, that the long-awaited Clearchus joined us with the remaining core of the army he had raised earlier with Cyrus'
darics,
a thousand fierce and silent scarlet-cloaked Spartan men-at-arms, each with two or three helot slaves to carry their heavy armor and weapons. He also brought eight hundred broad-shouldered Thracian targeteers who had defected to his forces, and two hundred Cretan bowmen. These were to form the hard-muscled center of Cyrus' Greek army, over which Clearchus himself was general, the counterpart to a Persian named Ariaius who commanded Cyrus' native forces. Clearchus was as terrifying an individual as Proxenus had led us to believe, and worse. His face was so homely and pockmarked as to be almost comical, but he had an evil, jagged scar running halfway down the side of his temple, which he was constantly picking at, keeping it inflamed, perhaps intentionally, for effect. His beard was so ragged and lice-infested as to raise eyebrows even for a Spartan, and he never smiled—in fact, he hardly even talked except to cuss out his men, and could barely chew for the rotten blackness of his teeth. He rode disdainfully among his troops, scarcely deigning to show obeisance to Cyrus, but his new recruits marched in perfect unison, without a single wasted movement or word, showing little concern and even less curiosity at the hundred thousand native troops gathered to watch their arrival. They followed Clearchus' smallest gesture and command as closely as if they were a single machine—a war machine, one begotten in turn by a determined god.

During the army's reorganization here at the Meander, Clearchus, surveying the situation, flew into a fury and demanded that the quantity of baggage and camp followers be drastically reduced—the Spartans refused to fight to protect clothing wagons, flute girls and kitchen staff. Cyrus resisted for a time, although when Clearchus threatened to march away with the troops he had just brought, the prince acquiesced in part, cutting the baggage train and followers by half, and paying the latter in gold to return to their homes. He insisted, however, in the face of much Spartan grumbling, on keeping a small coterie of slave girls and attendants—the prince was Persian, and had appearances to keep up.

In view of what the Fates had in store for me, I cannot say whether the prince's stubbornness in this affair was to my benefit or not, though his decision had as great an impact on my life as any decree from the gods, or from the Spartans, for that matter.

Clearchus be damned.

THE RAGGED, BAREFOOT boy sat on a boulder at the side of the trail, staring steadily into the distance as he methodically reached into the leather pouch at his hip, picking out grubs he had collected from beneath logs and roots, and munching them one by one. Not that I had ever been especially fond of the grubs and grasshoppers I myself had eaten as a slave in Athens—they filled the belly, barely, and that was about all one could say in their favor—but the fact that this boy was eating them so systematically indicated that they were a mainstay of his diet, not a supplement as they had been for me, and I sympathized with him.

For an hour Xenophon and I had been riding through the narrow gorge of the Meander, picking our way carefully upriver along a rocky trail ripe for twisting a horse's knee or laming its foot. We were seeking a crossing point that our guides had said was to be found nearby, but had seen nothing but the ruins of two rope-and-log bridges that the locals had recently cut, apparently in an attempt to hinder the army's progress. In fact, the army was not even following that path—Cyrus had no interest in pursuing minor tribes of nomadic herdsmen into the interior mountains. Still, our herds had been harassed lately by Pisidian raiding parties, and Xenophon had volunteered to go out in search of a path by which a more heavily armed band of hoplites might later be sent to frighten them away. Proxenus had consented, and assigned to us an interpreter named Cleon, and two Boeotian scouts.

We had to speak loudly to be heard above the roaring of the water, which rushed in a torrent through the narrow gap it had been cutting for the past several miles. On our right was a steep, gravelly hill, almost a cliff, unclimbable, riddled with the holes of an enormous colony of rodents that had constructed a vast network of tunnels beneath the surface. Small spills of flaking shale and debris occasionally tumbled down in front of or behind us as we passed, startling us into thinking that someone must be above us at the top of the ridge; yet whenever we looked, we saw only the pockmarked gravel and the occasional small furry head peeking stealthily out of a hole.

Seeing the boy sitting out here alone, I signaled for Xenophon to stop, and we pulled our horses up alongside, looking at him curiously. He ignored us completely, or feigned unawareness of our presence. He could not have been more than nine or ten years old, and I wondered how he had come to be here, for I saw no signs of any Pisidian encampment nearby. His cheeks were drawn in hunger, and his eyes hollow. The skin around his mouth was filthy, as if he had gorged on honey some time before and neglected to wash afterwards, allowing the dirt to collect around his lips and mingle with the steady stream of snot from his nose that he seemed to have no inclination to wipe off.

Xenophon and I looked at each other. "Is the boy right in the head?" I asked. He shrugged, and called over Cleon to help us communicate.

Cleon was a tall, rangy fellow with weak eyes and odd, bushy hair, a Pisidian who had been captured in a Persian raid years ago, but had become thoroughly Persianized since. He looked at the child disdainfully and barked a question at him. The boy showed no inkling of understanding, neglecting to even blink or glance at him; he merely continued to stolidly chew and pop the glistening white larvae. The interpreter asked something else, to equal effect, then shrugged his shoulders.

"He is an imbecile," Cleon said. "Either that or deaf and mute."

"It would be useful if we could get him to talk," said Xenophon, thoughtfully gazing at the urchin. "He clearly knows the country, or he would not be sitting here so comfortably. He must know if there are any crossings close at hand."

He swung off his horse and I did the same, welcoming the chance to stretch my legs. Xenophon sat down on the boulder beside the boy, rummaging through the pack he carried slung across the horse's haunches. Removing a chunk of roast boar left over from a hunting expedition two days before, he held it out to the famished child.

The boy's eyes flickered as he caught the scent of the meat, and he turned his head slowly to look into Xenophon's face. Almost faster than I could see, his hand shot out, and without even looking at the meat, he snatched it and in one swift motion stuffed it into his leather pouch. He intended it for later consumption, I suppose, because he then turned his gaze back to its previous target over the river, and resumed his slow chewing of the grubs.

"I'm not sure what that tells us," said Xenophon, puzzled. He motioned Cleon down from his horse too, and he looped the reins of all three over the twisted branches of a small shrub. The two Boeotians waited patiently fifty yards behind us along the trail, making their own snack and chatting quietly with each other.

"Speak to him more kindly," Xenophon said. "Don't demand to know where the crossing is. Just ask him what he is waiting for."

Cleon scowled, then with great effort softened his expression to a resigned grimace. He squatted beside the boy and questioned him for several minutes, but again to no avail. Just as he was standing up, however, the boy said something briefly in his language, only two or three words. Cleon stood looking at him motionless, as if waiting for more, but the boy had evidently said his piece and would speak no further. He shrugged.

"The boy says he is waiting for Death."

Xenophon looked more closely at the boy's face. "That's strange," he said. "He looks hungry, maybe, but nowhere near death. I wonder what he meant."

Just then, another trickle of gravel slid down and landed at our feet. We had learned to ignore these small slides, but the boy glanced down nervously at the rocks that had fallen before us. The small quantity of gravel was followed by a more substantial fall, this time involving several rocks of a size that could bruise a leg if they were to make a direct hit. I looked up to the top of the ridge, but saw nothing. The boy, however, had hopped down from his perch on the boulder and stood facing us, shifting from foot to foot.

"He looks as if he's about to say something now," I said, for he had opened his mouth and begun to speak, but his words were suddenly drowned by a crash and a deafening, sickening roar. When I looked up I saw that the entire shale cliff-face had split from its underlying structure, like bark sloughing off a rotten tree, had broken into enormous chunks, and was hurtling down upon us.

There was no time to seize our weapons, or to even think—one could only move. Xenophon and I leaped to the trail and raced forward, unthinking, seeking only to beat the crashing rocks we could hear tumbling down from the precipice above us, tearing out shrubs, boulders, everything in their path. Showers of dust, gravel and small rocks were falling about our heads and shoulders, and we seemed to be running impossibly slow, as one does in a nightmare. Within seconds we had skidded around a sharp bend, where the path clung closely to a corner of the cliff, and we realized that barring a collapse of the entire mountain, we were out of the course of the slide and were safe. We pressed our faces and chests against the rock wall, digging in with our fingernails, panting and gasping not from exhaustion, for the run had only been a few yards, but from the soul-purging effect of sheer terror.

For several minutes we listened as the rocks roared down the wall around the corner beyond our vision, slamming into the trail with a deafening crash. Hitting the flat ledge of the trail, the boulders paused briefly, as if to consider their position, then continued their frantic journey, crashing over the side of the lower wall and tumbling into the river below with a great splash of yellowish spray and foam. After a moment the roaring stopped as quickly as it had begun, and we stepped gingerly around our protective corner to witness the destruction.

The trail had been completely obliterated. No sign of life or human activity was evident, and the place where Cleon and our horses had been standing a moment before was piled twenty feet high with huge boulders. Dust hung heavily in the air, making it difficult to see and even to breathe, and the cliff face, which had before been a steep, almost vertical angle, now exhibited a great depression or cave, the depth of which could still not be clearly seen through the dust.

Over the steady throbbing of the river, however, we heard voices—not those of our own party, as we thought at first, but rather young voices—and looking up to the top of the ridge, we saw a line of perhaps fifty figures standing on the crest. The angle of the sun silhouetted them, so we were unable to identify their clothing or appearance, but from their build they looked to be boys—some as young as the one to whom we had spoken, others slightly older. Peering down from the ridge top, they cheered and waved at the destruction, which we now saw had been their own device. Several of the bigger youths were still holding the stout poles they had used as levers to force down boulders from the top and start the slide. The effect must have been even greater than they had originally hoped.

"Pisidians," Xenophon spat. "They ambushed us. We should have listened to the boy. He was waiting for death, he said. Ours. Look!"—and pointing halfway up the hill we saw the same boy energetically leaping and pulling himself from rock to rock up the side of the face, apparently having taken shelter from the slide under his boulder and emerged no worse for wear. How, I wondered, does a boy practice for something like that?

By now, the ruffians on the ridge had seen us, and were howling in outrage at their failure to destroy us with their onslaught. Half the band immediately disappeared, no doubt to take one of their secret trails down the side to finish us off where we stood, while the others began probing frantically with their levers, loosening more rocks and gravel and threatening to send another shower of boulders raining down on us.

Xenophon quickly pushed past me and skidded back around the corner where we had first taken shelter, to see what our options were in that direction. The trail behind us, from which we had come, was impassible. The trail forward was already filling with the shouts of angry boys descending to where we stood. An ominous trickle of gravel was beginning to fall on our heads from above. Xenophon looked at me, wild-eyed, and without a word we both began ripping off our armor, while at the same time half-scrambling, half-tumbling down the steep slope below us, hoping to ease into the river before we were crushed by another avalanche.

"Easing in" was not exactly what transpired, for at that point the river was flowing through a narrow defile with sheer rock faces extending twenty feet above the surface of the foaming water. We paused briefly at the lip, and with a quick prayer to the gods to recall to us the swimming skills we had learned as boys at Erchia, we leaped.

Eight hours later, to the astonishment of the sentries, we limped into camp, naked but for our sandals, covered with deep cuts, bruises, and thorn scratches. Half an hour of battering and near drowning in the roiling river had brought us four miles back downstream, safely out of reach of the Pisidians, but a long trek still from our camp, which we did not reach until dusk. Proxenus had already set about sorrowfully making funeral preparations for us, having been told in great detail by the two terrified Boeotian scouts of our gruesome deaths. He was overjoyed at our return and feted us far into the night with meat and uncut wine, begging us over and over to relate how we had leaped into the river to escape. Word of our adventure even made its way that evening to Cyrus, who had also been told of our untimely deaths, and who stopped by Proxenus' tent to congratulate us on evading this fate.

"Your return is a good omen for the army!" he exclaimed. "I have told the quartermaster to issue you new horses—you can arrange that in the morning. Meanwhile... by Zeus, Theo, take a look at that gash!" And he spent the rest of the evening with us, comparing his own scars with ours, and laughing at the likely reaction of the Pisidian boys when they descended their mountain and found we had disappeared.

About poor Cleon nothing more was ever said; but his loss was not a great one, for he was only an interpreter.

After leaving the Meander, we marched another one hundred and fifty uneventful miles further east, Cyrus celebrating and entertaining local dignitaries as we passed, until we arrived at the vast Plain of Caystros, where the army gathered like a huge flock of noisy crows, wheeling, strutting, and shouting orders and insults at each other. The pause was necessary to rest and regroup, as we had been on the road for over three months now, the weather had become deadly hot, and the Greek troops were slow in becoming acclimated. The Persian contingents in our army—Ariaius' troops and Cyrus' handpicked personal cavalry guard—ribbed the Greeks unmercifully about their complaints, saying that they themselves felt quite refreshed, since after all, we were still traveling through the relatively cool Pisidian mountains. "The best is yet to come," they taunted. "You soft-assed Greeks are going to wilt like flowers in the Syrian desert!"

Morale had begun to drop as well. The men had been complaining for some weeks now that they were owed back wages. The prince had allowed no looting on the way, nor plunder to be captured, and since he had paid the troops no stipends since we had left, the men were feeling the pinch every time they passed through a market town and were unable to buy even basic supplies, much less purchase trinkets or gamble. This distressed Cyrus greatly, for he had always been justly proud of having treated his men fairly, and he placed great stock on retaining their loyalty, particularly in view of the size of his army and its isolated position. Just as the grumbling was beginning to be of concern to the officers, we spied a short wagon train approaching in the distance. Cyrus did not seem at all surprised—in fact, he appeared to have been expecting it.

I was sitting on my horse next to Proxenus when it arrived, and we both watched it with interest. The coaches were richly appointed, with well-dressed horses and heavily muscled guards and liverymen garbed in fine silks and gold chains. "The train belongs to Queen Epyaxa of Cilicia," he said. As the woman carefully stepped down before the eyes of the gathering troops, I could see that she was past her youthful prime, though had not yet lost a certain flush of the beauty she had once possessed.