The Ten Thousand (32 page)

Drawing the blade quickly across the animal's neck, the seer grasped the horns more tightly with his free hand as the beast's head jerked once in shock and pain, and then he let it collapse limply, as the blood spurted and sprayed into the water, spattering the hems of the priest's white vestments a bright crimson. We craned our necks, peering intently at the scene, as the priest straightened up slowly from his bloody task, and with a triumphant shout that carried bell-like across the din of the water, he proclaimed, "Zeus Savior, Lord and Protector: Victory!" We lifted our weapons and shields and erupted in a great cry that resounded between the steep sides of the riverbank. The massed enemy troops on the other side, both cavalry and footmen, stood watching in silence, unmoving and expressionless, their own weapons and armor glinting fiercely in the sun.

Chirisophus gave a shout, and then plunged into the water with his division, half the army, wading in near perfect formation across the deepening river. They were led by Lycius and his ragtag band of cavalry, and as the men marched into the steadily deepening flow they trusted implicitly in the Rhodians' account that the water would not rise above their waists. In reality, the crossing was even easier than expected, for Rhodian boys are short, and the water scarcely rose to the middle of a full-grown man's thighs. The Armenian troops on the far side let loose a barrage of arrow and sling fire, but since they dared not approach closer to the Greeks, most of their missiles fell short, to the chagrin of their officers whom we could see exhorting and even beating their targeteers to advance within shooting range.

Xenophon, meanwhile, had split his half of the army again into two parts, his hoplites remaining at the river bank to guard the provisions and cover Chirisophus' crossing, while the Rhodian slingers and other light troops doubled back downstream toward our previous night's camp. As they progressed in a quick trot, they loudly sounded the horns and reeds, purposely warning the enemy of their march and leading the Armenians to assume that Xenophon wished to cross at a point downstream, thus trapping the enemy in a pincer maneuver between his and Chirisophus' troops. Taking the bait, the overeager Armenian cavalry leaped into action, falling out of their tenuous formation, and galloped madly downstream in a disorganized mob to defend against Xenophon's audacious assault on their flank.

Seeing this, Lycius whipped his horse in the middle of his crossing, and in an inspired display of sheer nerve, raced his band of cavalry straight across at the larger, but unorganized, mass of enemy riders, to the accompanying roar of Chirisophus' marching infantry. The astonished Armenian cavalry skidded to a halt in confusion as to which of the two attacks, Xenophon's or Lycius', most required their attention. They stood dumbly for a moment, their horses milling and rearing in growing alarm at Lycius' fast-approaching and frenetically screaming riders. Suddenly, the Armenian cavalry wheeled as one, like a flock of starlings startled by a loud noise from below, and scattered in panic into the hills, to the deafening shouts of Xenophon's light troops who had been watching the scene unfold from the near side of the river.

Chirisophus, meanwhile, who was steadily completing his own crossing, kept his men in formation and pressed straight toward the wonder-struck Armenian foot soldiers. The Armenians, seeing their cavalry fleeing like rabbits and the strangely armored, hypnotically chanting Greek warriors advancing relentlessly toward them out of the misty depths of the river, themselves panicked and quickly retreated off the high banks.

Chirisophus captured the heights without a struggle and pumped his fist in triumph, and Xenophon, seeing that all had gone well with the initial crossing, now doubled back toward the pack animals and hoplites. By the time he returned with his winded troops, the last of the Hellenic baggage train had crossed and was now safely in Chirisophus' protection. Xenophon then lined up his hoplites with their backs to the river, facing the gathering Kurd forces, and prayed for the strength and time to cover the Rhodians' crossing before the Kurds charged and overwhelmed our now vastly diminished and outnumbered troops. As his men stood nervously in array, facing the approaching Kurdish army, he paced in front of them, his mind racing to improvise a strategy.

"Hold your weapons!" he shouted finally, "until the first Kurdish sling-stone hits a shield. When you hear the rattle of that stone, chant the battle hymn, sound the salpinx and go at the enemy for all you're worth. We have only one chance—terrify them!"

At the first sling-shot from the now-charging Kurds, the men erupted in a massive roar, echoed by the Rhodians picking their way gingerly behind us through the water, and the Hellenic troops eagerly watching the action on the heights above the far bank. The deafening bellow hit the startled Kurds like a blast from an open furnace, and they falteringly careened to a halt and stared. As the Greek salpinx blared, the hoplites sprinted through the gravel straight at the enemy lines in a massed charge worthy of Plataea. The lightly armored Kurds did not wait to test our mettle in hand-to-hand fighting. Spinning in terror, they dropped their weapons where they stood and began clambering hand over hand back up the steep banks which they had just charged down only moments before. As soon as Xenophon saw that the Kurds had turned, he ordered the salpinx to sound a general retreat, and the Greeks, needing no further encouragement, themselves skidded to a halt, and again in a frenzied sprint, went tearing in the opposite direction back toward the river, leaping into the water and wading frantically for the other side.

For a moment Chirisophus' troops on the far heights had an unprecedented view of the two armies, thousands of men, their front lines barely yards apart, both simultaneously fleeing each other in terror, and they roared out their laughter and encouragement to the splashing hoplites. The Kurds finally realized they had been tricked, and it was with no small effort that the Kurdish officers succeeded in reversing their men's course to give chase to the fleeing Greeks.

At this point, however, Chirisophus' peltasts, who had been waiting on the far bank for just such an emergency, themselves charged into the water, javelins at the thong and arrows at the string. They met Xenophon's troops midstream and covered their retreat with a withering fire straight into the faces of the baffled Kurds, who again were forced to halt their charge and retreat in chaos. To cheers from the spectators above, the entire army was able to complete the terrible crossing with scarcely a single casualty, except for a few overeager peltasts who gave chase to the Kurds beyond the midpoint of the river and were cut down upon their arrival at the other side.

For once, the gods had been with us.

BOOK TEN

In vain, man's expectations, in vain, his boastful words.

God brings the unthought to be,

As here we see.

—EURIPIDES

THE AGONY OF hatred, the ecstasy of love. Trite notions, easily separable into their distinct, almost opposite component parts, sung of by poets and wept at by lovers from time immemorial and undoubtedly for a hundred generations to come. The ecstasy of hatred, the agony of love. A no-less-common state of affairs, though comprehended by fewer numbers, perhaps only the Clearchuses among us: the impetus behind the movers of the world, the creators and killers and bestirrers of humanity. Again, they are sentiments easily divided into their identifiable and perfectly contrasting elements, like gold so assayed by fire as to congeal into pure, glistening droplets, distinguishing itself from the surrounding slag.

Pain, denial, triumph, tears, passion, revenge, betrayal, rapture. To which condition do we ascribe these emotions and motivations, to hatred, or to love? The admixture becomes more dense, more difficult to define, and the two seem to meld seamlessly into each other. Although the two perfect, unalloyed extremes may be easily distinguished, and unskilled poets and petty philosophers will make much of their facile ability to do so, the twilight region between the two, that murky area that incorporates irreducible elements of both, or perhaps of a third component newly created by the commingling of the others, is much less easily described. War and hatred are evil, love sublime. And yet: there are good men who could, if they wished, live in peace but who choose instead to fight; who could live a life of ease, but instead enjoy hardship; who could derive joy from lavishing riches on their beloved, but instead spend their wealth on warfare, toiling under the command of Ares rather than of Aphrodite, and even putting the former in the service of the latter.

Such is the complexity of humanity, which at times confounds even the gods, and ultimately prevents them from being mere celestial puppeteers, from representing the earth as a malleable stage set. The world in which men live and act, although not totally inexplicable, is not completely rational either. Reason and folly, the foreseen and the unexpected, madness and calm exist side by side, not only between two individuals but within the same person as well, all to different degrees. The contradictions of life, the simultaneous sorrow and relief at parting, the destruction inherent in creation itself, all these befuddle the mind, as well as illumine it. In my memoir thus far I have written of war and love as two separate entities, unrelated to each other, perhaps even in direct defiance of each other, one the sickness and the other the cure, each pushing and struggling like wrestlers for whom the dusty ring holds room for only one champion. It is time to move beyond such shallow poesy, for this is not life, nor is it my story.

THE WINTER, WHICH had long been threatening the army with graying skies and freezing temperatures, finally descended in all its fury. Just as a long-awaited battle, when it finally arrives, is more a source of relief than a cause for fear, so too, at least at first, was the vicious cold of the winter we had so long dreaded. When it arrived the army was actually billeted under shelter, in comfortable barracks and huts surrounding the palace of Tiribazus, King Artaxerxes' satrap and governor of southern Armenia, who had grudgingly agreed to a truce provided that we not burn his villages and that we take only the supplies we needed. We had secured food and comfortably settled in for a few days to tend to the sick and injured, which in truth included all of us, and to reorganize our supplies. The first night we were there Zeus dropped two feet of snow on our roofs, and over the next few days several feet more, raising the level of the drifts up to the eaves of our low huts and keeping the men and animals practically immobilized in the cluster of villages into which we had moved. Not a word of complaint was heard, however. In fact, the silent snow muffled all words completely, and as I trudged out on my rounds, bearing messages between Xenophon and the captains and beating a path to the tiny woodshed occupied by Asteria, the only other humans I saw were Chirisophus' and the captains' own couriers, bundled, like me, in skins in a fruitless attempt to ward off the bitter cold. Rumors flew among the men that the army would remain here for the winter, that further travel in the snow beyond this point would be suicidal. Xenophon and Chirisophus, despite their reluctance to delay their stay among the enemy for any longer than necessary, were seriously discussing this option. Trudging through the snow to Asteria's hut to discuss this news with her, and wondering why she had not sought me out as often lately as before, I was surprised at the number of tracks I found in the snow leading to her entrance. Normally Asteria picked the most secluded shelter possible in which to make her bed, an isolated pigsty or chicken coop known only to me and a few of the Rhodians. This time, however, the path to her coop was as heavily traveled as the road to Delphi. Turning the corner around a rocky outcropping behind which her little stone hut was hidden, I was taken aback to find at least thirty Rhodians milling about outside the shelter in various states of limping dishevelment, attempting to keep warm by standing around several campfires that had been built. Other boys were passing in and out of the hut, lifting the stiff, heavy hide she had hung for a door, which had now frozen to the thickness and consistency of a board.

I stood briefly in the snow, amazed at the sight, a growing anger welling within me, as the Rhodian boys looked up briefly and then returned to their own conversations. Shouldering roughly past those standing closest to the doorway, I bent down to a squat to make my way in, and slammed my head painfully against that of a boy attempting to exit at the same time, sending us both sprawling backwards. Seething, I got up and again duck-walked into the hut, this time with my hands extended in front of me to seize the idiot who had run into me. Before I was able to, however, he slipped past me in the darkness and pushed his way out through the low door, and I forgot about him almost immediately as I concentrated on regaining my bearings in the stone structure. Having entered from the snowy glare outside, my eyes took several seconds to adjust to the darkness, and when they did I found Asteria sitting cross-legged in a corner, a Rhodian sprawled on his back in front of her with his foot in her lap, both of them staring at me in surprise.

"In the name of the twelve gods, Asteria," I hissed, unwilling to let my voice resound too loudly. "What are you doing? Do you know how many Rhodians are lined up outside your door?"

Asteria and the boy continued to stare at me in astonishment, and then Asteria, her lips a thin, hard line and her eyes narrowed in anger, bent her head back to the boy's foot in silence, and began applying a salve to the deep, raw grooves where the untanned leather of the sandal thongs had shrunk and cut into the boy's skin. She moved quickly and, I fear, somewhat roughly on account of my having startled her, and the boy winced and grunted several times in pain as she worked her greasy finger deep into the bloody score marks. Finally, she reached behind her and seized a tattered piece of fabric, which I saw with some surprise was the remnant of a gown she had once worn herself in better days and had somehow managed to smuggle this far. She carefully tore a strip along the hem, and wrapped it sparingly around the boy's treated foot in the same pattern as the sandal straps, wasting not an inch of the precious fabric. "Keep your sandal straps over the cloth, not against your skin," she counseled, "and if the cloth slips off or wears through, come to me for more, or use grass or leaves for padding. Whatever you do, don't use untanned hide directly on the skin."

The boy nodded and rose to leave, but as he bent to make his way through the flap, Asteria called him back. "Peleus—ask the next one to wait a moment before coming in." The boy nodded again, silently, and slipped out the door.

As the flap fell back over the entrance and the hut descended again into its semidarkness, Asteria turned on me in a fury.

"By what right do you humiliate me, breaking in on me like this to question what I do?"

"You complain of me?" I said in amazement, no longer even bothering to keep my voice down. "I... we have taken great risks to shield your identity. Do you realize the trouble I endure to steal away at night to see you? And then when I arrive I find a small village camped around your hut, like Penelope's hundred and thirty-six suitors. Truly, you are the army's worst-kept secret."

Asteria stared at me, her eyes wide in astonishment, her mouth working soundlessly as she struggled for words. Finally, she found her voice.

"Are you a prince?" she spat, her words stinging. "Did you inherit me from the Persian royal family? By what law, by whose
commandment,
do you possess me?!" Her voice was a barely controlled hiss, and in her tense rage I felt as though I were trapped in the close room with a coiled serpent.

"It was these boys who saved me and continued to protect me—" she continued, trembling in her fury, "and for what? What have you done for them? What gold do you have to give them for me? Perhaps I should pay them with this currency?" and she tore open the front of her tunic, exposing her delicate breasts, her slender chest heaving from the exertion of her pent-up fury, her fragile ribs protruding sharply beneath and emphasizing the flat hollow of her stomach. I stared at her in horror.

"Asteria," I said calmly, reaching my hand out to her as I struggled to regain my composure, "for the love of the gods! It was I who asked them to watch over you. You know my situation—I can't be caring for you every minute of the day as we march..."

She shook my hand off her shoulder roughly, glaring like a Fury.

"Did I ever ask you to? Have I ever asked you for a single thing, other than salves and medical supplies? Did you think those were all for me?"

"Asteria, please," I said placatingly, "your tunic. You know what I meant..."

"I know precisely what you meant, and I reject it absolutely. I refuse to be a comfort for you by night and a burden to these boys by day. The only thing I have to give them in return for their protection is myself, and I alone will be the judge of how I do that. I have chosen to be their physician. But if I had decided otherwise, you would have no right to complain."

I glared at her as she slowly, deliberately fastened the hook and loop at the neck of her tunic, and threw a tattered blanket over her shoulders for warmth, holding my stare with her own determined gaze. Finally she looked down and sighed loudly in exasperation.

"Perhaps I should have told you earlier that I was treating their ailments. I distrusted your reaction, and now I see, with good reason. When word spread how I had helped Nicolaus, dozens of the other Rhodians came seeking treatment as well. How am I to turn them away?—I am dependent upon them. They are merely boys, though Xenophon has turned them into killers, and they themselves are now dying like men—but they are still only boys."

"They're doing their duty," I said coldly, "as Xenophon has led them to do, no more nor less than the rest of us. The only breach of this pact binding us all to each other is you. This is a dangerous thing we have done. You are being smuggled. And if word of this violation were to become known throughout the army, the whole thread could unravel, and..."

She cut me off dismissively, tossing her shorn head in anger as she flopped back down in the corner among her supplies.

"So now my existence has been reduced to someone's breach of duty? I have my own betrayal burdening my soul."

"You bring up your father again, your invisible father? I see no betrayal—he's not here to help you, nor to suffer any disloyalty. Betrayal of a phantom is a phantom betrayal. I am speaking of something real, of my duty and honor to the army..."

"Men's honor,
your
precious honor, is the least of my worries. I am more concerned with the Rhodians' infected toes. I trust these boys with my life. There is no love lost between them and the rest of your thugs. The Rhodians have been made to feel like outsiders, like inferiors, for so long that you may rest assured they will not be doing any favors for anyone outside their little group—except perhaps Xenophon, who brought them together. I think they would die for him—or at least smuggle."

I stood fuming silently at this, at a loss for words, while she rearranged her tinctures and ointments in silence, as if she had forgotten I was even there. Finally, she looked up at me, a cold and impatient expression on her face.

"Would you please send in the next boy as you leave?"

The fourth night we spent in our lodgings, three Hellenic scouts who had become separated from the main body of troops after the previous river crossing finally straggled into camp, starving and nearly frozen to death, ill-prepared in their short tunics and oxhide sandals for the bitter conditions they had faced. The army surgeons were forced to remove the men's feet, ears and fingers, which had frozen under the influence of what the locals termed "frostbite." They were showing signs of gangrene, the flesh-rotting disease which, if not immediately cut from the body, would be sure to send its fatal poison throughout the entire organism. Before they died of sheer pain the next day, the hapless soldiers called for Xenophon, who came to their cots immediately, showering them with praise for their valor and promising them ample rewards upon their recovery and return to Greece. This the men shrugged off miserably, knowing perhaps that they were merely empty words of comfort. But the eldest among them, a veteran Cretan named Syphion, gestured to Xenophon to bend closer, to hear his final words.

"The fires, General," he croaked. Xenophon looked at the man, puzzled. "One day out, no more, for a man with healthy legs—thousands of fires in the hills. The Armenians—they're massing."

The other two men nodded in silence, and I shuddered. The wretched creatures had been staggering through the snow lame and frozen for days, surrounded by the sight of thousands of comforting campfires built to warm the asses of the enemy troops forming up in the hills, while unable to build their own tiny flame for fear of giving away their position. Xenophon helped the men drink a cup of wine, to warm their hearts and deaden their pain and fear of death, then wandered away thoughtfully.

"We can't stay here, Theo," he finally said in dismay. "Tiribazus has taken a lesson from Tissaphernes—he's breaking his truce and hoping to kill us in our beds. It's not safe for the army to be dispersed among the villages while the enemy masses on the heights."

I looked at the snow-covered hills, forage for the animals buried under two yards of white stuff, the troops ill-prepared to travel through the bitter cold. "How can you even think of marching the men under these conditions?" I asked. "Can't you see us, days hence? An army of ten thousand, crawling through the snow like poor Syphion, but without a warm village ahead of us at which we could hope to receive shelter."

He refused to meet my gaze. "We are divided among five villages, miles apart. We could never defend ourselves under these conditions. Better a chance of escape into the mountains, than certain death here in our beds."

He ordered the men to pack that very day and the army left the next morning, two hours before dawn, before the Armenians, whose campfires in the hills even our local scouts could now see on their nightly rounds, realized that we were departing. Some of the men, out of sheer malice and disregard for orders, burnt the huts they were leaving behind, and Xenophon ordered the scoundrels to be committed to baggage detail for an entire month as punishment. The skies cleared during the day and the men's hopes rose that the winter cold might lift for a time, and afford us proper traveling weather. This was in vain, however, for during the entire day we were scarcely able to lurch six miles through the deep drifts. That night, as we huddled under our blankets and improvised shelters of branches and wagons, a driving snow fell upon us, a snow that rose to the tops of the cart wheels, dousing our fires, collapsing our tents and covering the weapons and the men lying near them.

In the freezing, blinding storm, I picked my way carefully through the drifts to the Rhodian camp, or what I could find of it. Through a series of grunted questions and answers, I was able to make out Asteria's lodging—a shallow hollow against a large, rotten stump, not apart from the other troops this time, but rather shared with three or four exhausted, shivering boys. I wordlessly squeezed in beside her, surprised to hear no complaint from the Rhodian next to her about my clumsy jostling, until on a sudden impulse I touched his face and found he was dead. Horrified, I dragged the stiffened body a few feet away and laid it for protection in a deep drift. I then returned and mounded a low wall of snow around us all, as a desperate shelter from the roaring wind, checked the faces of the other Rhodians to be sure they were only sleeping and not expired as well, and nestled Asteria's shivering body against mine under the thin blanket. Though she made no effort to assist me, possibly still angry at my harsh words of several days earlier, neither did she protest. I pulled the blanket tighter, and watched the snow fall around and over us, and set myself to survive the endless night.