The Ten Thousand (38 page)

THIS, OF COURSE, is the dramatic climax of my tale, the point at which, had it been a drama enacted on the stage, the audience would be settling back into their seats, hoarse from cheering, wiping the tears from their eyes, while the play concluded with some feeble spoken epilogue recited by the story's narrator, or a closing hymn chanted by the chorus. If the gods had any sense of proportion or balance, or even artistic awareness, this is what they would have permitted, and indeed the feeble epilogue will be coming soon enough, for those readers who would not feel my reminiscing to be complete without it; but the gods had one further plot twist in mind.

There is a dramatic device often used in our Greek plays, which I consider as being a sign of intellectual laziness, or perhaps excessive piety, on the part of the playwright, and it very well may be that the two are the same thing. Just when the protagonist's circumstances appear to be as dire as can be imagined, with no possible way to escape his impending doom, an actor representing a benevolent and all-powerful deity is lowered by ropes and pulleys from the top of the stage. He then proceeds to emit lightning bolts to destroy the enemy, or cast a spell to reconcile the young lovers, or perform whatever other sorcery may be required to enable the drama to be satisfactorily resolved and to tie up all loose ends in the remaining moments. We refer to this as a "mechanical god," a means of putting back to rights all that is unresolved, in a way not otherwise humanly possible.

To my knowledge, no playwright has yet considered the opposite phenomenon of, shall we call it, a "mechanical Nemesis," though language and Greek dramatic tradition fail me here. The image I mean to convey is one of a grubby, smirking little satyr that clambers unannounced from where it has been lurking beneath the stage floorboards and proceeds to immediately undo all satisfactory outcomes that have been rendered. In the final minutes of the play, he throws into chaos all instances of victory, reconciliation, and happy endings that were on the verge of being so painstakingly wrought. But in the drama of human life, is not this phenomenon more common than the former? Is it not truly a more realistic example of the actual behavior and performance of the gods, either through clumsy blundering or willful spite? It is no wonder, therefore, that I have lost faith in the benevolence of our guardian deities.

The Wheel of Fate turned. Just as a cat tortures and plays with a mouse before finishing him off, so the gods toyed with us. The deity often takes pleasure in making the small great and the great small.

For months we had sacrificed to the gods daily, in entreaty, in thanksgiving, for guidance. Down to our last starving goat we had sacrificed to the gods. Libations of water had been poured in the absence of wine, stale bread crumbled in the absence of animals. Never had Xenophon neglected his duties to Zeus and Apollo, in fact he had insisted on their faithful exercise, even in the face of Chirisophus' clear exasperation. Never was there a more faithful or exacting acolyte to the gods, until the day of our arrival at the summit of the mountain. But there, in our excitement at finally arriving within view of the sea, in the troops' ecstatic promotion of Xenophon from mere general to hero, we innocently, though apparently not forgivably, forgot to sacrifice to the gods in thanksgiving.

In return, they sent us honey.

A great deal of honey, hundreds of hives of the stuff, heaps of the sweetest, stickiest, most nourishing and delicious gobs of golden dew we had ever tasted, which we looted from an enormous apiary in the mountains after easily routing the last hill tribe standing between us and the sea, the Colchians. The fact that it was stolen made it even sweeter, and the famished men hooted and danced like children as they tore into the lightly constructed hives, ripping them with their spears, driving the bees away with blackly smoking pine-pitch torches, ignoring the feeble stings of the few brave little insects who remained behind to defend their property. The men, already near delirium from their awareness of the nearby sea, gorged on the stuff. They wandered among the hives in blissful content with honey smeared on their faces and hands, congealing in their hair, tossing handfuls of honey mass and sticky comb at each other out of pure mischief after they were sated. Their pleasure was so pure, their delight after the suffering they had endured over the winter so innocent, that none of the officers had the heart to even attempt to maintain discipline, and in fact were hard pressed themselves to keep from jokingly smearing a wad of the bounty into their fellow captains' faces out of sheer delight.

There is an old story of the Thessalian King Knopos, who was advised by his priestess Enodia to select the largest and finest bull, and then drug it with her potion. The maddened bull escaped and was captured by the enemy, who accepted it as a good omen, sacrificed it and ate it in a feast. Upon consuming the drugs, they went mad and were slaughtered by Knopos' troops in a brutal attack. Whether the Colchians had poisoned our honey in their retreat in the manner of that ancient king, or whether the starving bellies of our troops were simply unaccustomed to the richness of this dessert, within hours all who ate of it fell violently ill, leaving their senses, puking and retching, an astringent greenish diarrhea running uncontrollably down their legs. Men who merely tasted the honey appeared as if they were drunk. Those who ate a great deal ranted like madmen, raving and feverish, lying about in heaps and sometimes even dying, recalling the days of the plague in Athens. Men rolled on the ground in pain, their bellies distended, their faces contorted and their swollen tongues turning blue as they bit their own flesh in agony. The stickiness on their hands and faces, which they had not even had time to wash off before being stricken, collected dirt and leaves from the ground, as well as the filth being ejected from their bodies. As they lay in agony, their eyes pooled in horror and disbelief at the realization that after months of bravery and hardship, the seemingly invincible Greek warriors could be brought to defeat and collapse by such innocent sweetness.

Not a man, Xenophon and the other officers included, could stand on his feet, and it is a wonder that the Colchians did not return and slaughter us all in our wretchedness. Indeed, many of the troops would have thanked them for putting them out of their misery. The fact that the Colchians did not return is perhaps the truest proof that they had not, in fact, knowingly poisoned the honey, and I should probably be thankful to the gods for that, though I cannot help but think that if I were to praise the deities for such an empty gift, I would only be encouraging them in their puerile games. Had I seen such a scene as this in a play in Athens, I would have scoffed at the playwright's clumsy and heavy-handed treatment of irony, bringing the most valiant and long-suffering fighters on earth to their knees by a pleasure as innocent as a mouthful of honey. No doubt the audience, too, would have been offended at the author's apparent insult of the gods. The fact that this was no mere stage drama made the deities' betrayal all the more damning.

Most of us recovered within a day or two, and stumbling to our feet as if dazed and drugged, we staggered back into formation, burying the dead and attempting to regain our threadbare dignity. Asteria, however, a lover of honey since childhood, had gorged on the substance, and when I was finally able to locate her among the miserably retching groups of Rhodians, I found her lying unconscious, scarcely breathing, her bile-encrusted lips turning blue with cold and her bare legs under the short tunic caked with the filth in which she had been lying untended. Weak and trembling as I was, I struggled to pick her up and was startled to find that her body felt as light and fragile as a bundle of dry twigs, bereft of any muscle or fat after the long march and the purging of the last two days. All remaining softness had disappeared from her limbs and torso, and her feverish face was hollow with huge, darkly circled, watery eyes, which had rolled back into her head with only the whites showing beneath the bluish lids. I carried Asteria's body in my arms along the path down the last range of coastal foothills, and I felt certain that my own life had ended.

THAT DAY, A year after their glorious departure from Sardis, something under ten thousand starving, half-naked, bushily bearded Greek troops, wearing full, battered armor and bearing triumphant expressions, limped in perfect formation out of the foothills before the incredulous townspeople of Trapezus. Grime filled every pore and fold of their skin, and traces of the dried vomit from their most recent misadventure were still visible in the corners of their mouths and under their chins. Their teeth were rotten or missing, and they hawked great phlegmy gobs on the earth which were trampled under the thickly horned, bare feet of the men marching heedlessly behind them. Their dented helmets were slung from their shoulders by the nasals, or simply perched carelessly on the tops of their heads, the empty eye sockets peering blackly at the sky, like masks on their pegs. The men told unbelievable tales of walking a thousand miles overland from Babylon, and they bore only half as many toes and fingers as an army that size should have. The troops around me bellowed out the paean to Apollo in their weary gratitude at having finally arrived among friends and allies, and the townspeople looked on in wonder and awe at the men's matted hair and tattered scarlet cloaks, but I was deaf and blind to all around me. In truth I was hardly in worse shape than when I had started, with the exception of the physical toll I had suffered, which would fade with time. Still, I had had a taste of glory and fullness, I had desired Xenophon's peach, and once having known a hint of such richness, even for an instant, its absence made me feel infinitely poorer.

I broke ranks without informing a soul, and entered the first miserable inn I encountered, kicking in doors with my feet until I found a room with a vacant cot, where I deposited Asteria's body before turning to arrange settlement with the astonished innkeeper. I had no money, not an obol to my name, so I left my battered and still blood-begrimed shield and helmet as surety, gave instructions that I was not to be disturbed except for a simple meal once a day, and entered the room with Asteria, closing the door behind me on the innkeeper and on the army, on Xenophon and on the man I was up to that day.

I am no physician, certainly no Hippocrates, and I doubt that any but midwives and witches would have been available in that wretched town in any case. To tell the truth, I was more concerned with finding an undertaker than a physician, though often in such places the same august personage would fill one and the same role, conflict of interest notwithstanding. The army surgeons I had seen among our troops and even in Athens invariably had but one remedy for hemorrhage: further bleeding. If the woman survived that, she would survive her illness; if not, then so it was ordained by the gods. The Hippocratians would put on an impressive show, to be sure, taking samples of the patient's vomit, blood, tears, snot, uterine fluid, sweat, urine, runoff from festering wounds, ear wax, and any other bodily emissions they could extract, then analyze them by tasting them, or if the patient were cogent, having her taste them herself. But I would have no such indignities performed on Asteria. I would care for her my way.

During one of the long evenings, as I sat silently on the edge of her cot watching her fitful and feverish sleep, I fetched a bowl of cool water and proceeded to sponge the perspiration off her body, trying despite the filth of our surroundings to keep her in some semblance of cleanliness. I absentmindedly murmured her name, "Asteria," more to myself than in any hope she might answer me. The word passed through the long, vast wilderness of her consciousness, enveloped in darkness and inhabited by shades, meandering through the lonely byways of her mind and lingering for eons, it seemed, before finally reaching its destination; whereupon it slowly elicited a response, which traversed the tortuous path back through the shades to the outside as the mists slowly dissipated and her tongue moved laboriously, her eyes still closed: "Theo." The word was spoken so softly it startled me, and I wasn't even sure I had heard it, for her expression had not changed, nor had her eyelashes even fluttered. I had almost resigned her whisper to a figment of my imagination, perhaps a truer assessment of my existence than I had ever realized, when she spoke again, with an infinite effort: "Forgive me."

I looked up and saw her struggling to speak, gasping silently, her lips and tongue working thickly. Some inner surge of energy had welled up within her, and she would not be put down. Her lids lifted half open, and she looked at me strangely, feverishly, with glassy eyes that alternated from steely gray to pale blue as my flickering light reflected off them, only to become suddenly very dark, the color of the ocean depths or of the grave, if touched by even so much as a hint of shadow.

"Theo," she struggled. "You loved Proxenus as a brother, as you love Xenophon." I nodded silently, my astonishment at hearing her speak tempered by the fear that it was some awful disclosure that was prodding her to do so. I begged her to be silent, to rest.

"I'm sorry, Theo," she gasped again, and then lay panting, her eyes closed, struggling to regain her breath and her calm. I did not interrupt her effort, except to tighten my grasp on her racing pulse, and to pad away the beads of perspiration that had sprung out on her forehead in her feverish striving.

"Asteria," I said finally, "you have nothing to be sorry for. Proxenus was a soldier, he died as a soldier, and he is with the gods."

At this her eyes fluttered wide open, and her expression was absorbed by an inexpressible sadness and torment. "I—I killed him," she said, looking straight into my eyes, and then repeated it over and over, in a voice drained of strength and emotion, fading away from me again. "I killed him."

Oddly, I felt a relief at this, knowing full well that she had done nothing of the sort and that she was merely being taunted by a grotesque dream, some savagery of the gods who were not satisfied with torturing her body, but sought to torment her mind as well.

"Asteria, sleep. You killed no one, it is only a dream." She was still agitated and shaking, still trying to say something, which I knew would be only further hallucination. I sought to dissuade this useless expenditure of her depleted strength by repeating the calming words. "You did not kill Proxenus. Tissaphernes did. You are innocent."

At this she gasped and nearly sat up in her frustration at being unable to make me understand, and her desperation to speak. "You foolish man!" she blurted, in a voice rasping and whispery, her face contoured with pain. "
I
am Tissaphernes!" Thus having spoken she collapsed back down onto her flat, sodden pillow, panting and wretched. I sat wide-eyed, astonished at the strength of her outburst, but at length I resumed my calming litany of platitudes, and was finally rewarded to see her shallow breathing return to normal, and her tensed limbs begin to relax.

She looked up at me once more, her face bearing an expression of profound sadness. Her lips worked silently, and I thought she might again try to give voice to words better left unsaid and unpondered, but then, slowly closing her lids, she reentered the land of shades and dreams which she had inhabited for so many days. Dreams, those torments, desires, false and true portents—that larval, ghostly world inhabited by an even greater abundance of jeering, irrational beings than may be found in our waking existence. She disintegrated as if descending down an ever darkening well, each level more constricting than the last. I was beyond her now, she was fighting her own battle, entirely alone with her little life and the memories of her meager sins, and even when sleeping she occasionally wept hot tears because both her years and her memories were quickly departing.

Later that night, I carefully rolled her into a fetal position in an attempt to relieve the unremitting fire in her belly. I then gently stroked her neck and back hairline, that soft, magical place on a woman's body where the smooth curve of her nape becomes as downy as a child's and then transforms into the line of soft, feathery wisps along the curved edge of her locks, those tiny hairs that defy all attempts at taming, even when the rest of the woman's hair is subject to the most elaborate binding. Wondrous little cilia they are, which when backlit by a lamp, shine and glow like a sort of aurora, undying remnants from the woman's childhood, as visible and as beautiful and as unmanageable on the richest Persian queen as on the poorest peasant maiden, the first hairs to appear as an infant, guardians of her sweet, female scent her entire life, the last wisps to remain on her head in her feeble dotage, defying time and space. I lingered there with the cool sponge, emptying my mind and thinking of nothing as she sighed and murmured in her sleep.

I had just leaned down to lift her back to the center of the cot when I noticed a small mark or spot, just at her back hairline. I had never noticed it before, for prior to her illness I had never seen Asteria's body in daylight, and before that, when Cyrus was still alive, her neck had never been exposed due to her long hair. Bringing the oil lamp closer and bending down slowly, I could make out the faded outlines of the traditional infant tattoo she had been given after her birth in Sardis, to identify her father and family origins in the event of a disaster. I peered at it carefully, trying to make out the faint lines and distinguish between shadow and ink, when suddenly I caught my breath and sat up as if stung by a scorpion, jostling her roughly and causing her to moan in her sleep.

The symbol on her neck was one I had seen and trembled at many times, one that had haunted my dreams for nights on end, one I thought I had left behind me forever months before—the winged horse of Tissaphernes.

I was horrified, and shuddering, I stood up and backed away from her cot to the far wall, where I stood motionless, staring at the shriveled, miserable creature lying unconscious across from me. Coming to myself, I paced the room for hours, pounding my fist at the stone wall until the knuckles bled, bellowing my rage and defiance of the gods, willing myself, against all better judgment, to ignore what I had just seen, to remain constant toward Asteria as if she had not been so savagely defiled by the tiny mark, more polluted than she could ever have been by foul Antinous in the hut. The effort I made was supreme, perhaps more exhausting than any I had experienced on the entire march, for this was a battle within myself, against the very gods, and one that I fought bitterly in my mind and my soul until finally, utterly depleted, I collapsed on the floor and slept a sleep of death, but the sleep of a victor.

Hours later I awoke, and listened for Asteria's breathing, and was at peace. The trap of the gods had not defeated me, for unlike one that strikes at one's health or that threatens one's safety, this was a strike at the mind, and at my mind alone, one that I had in myself to accede to or to defeat. The gods force men to love those whom they should not, and to disrequite those whom they should. Answerable only to their own devices, which are unknowable to mortals, they let perish those who should live, and spare those who should perish. But this time the gods' comedic timing was off. The annoying satyr that had been dogging my tracks for weeks had made this one further cheap attempt to play the clown, but had flubbed his lines, fatally delaying his entrance until far beyond the point when the maximum impact could be felt. Rather than meriting a standing ovation from his fellow deities at the cleverness of his stage pranks, he elicited nothing more than a bored yawn. My state of mind was now such that I could think of no better vengeance on Tissaphernes than this. The classic elopement scene, the showdown between the enraged father and the grinning and triumphant son-in-law. The nasty, hairy-eared little demon who had been pursuing me made a quick exit from the stage in embarrassment, and did not return.

I buried her in the hills outside the town, in a hole scratched into the earth using my sword and bare hands. No marker or monument did I erect, for Asteria's very presence in this city was unknown to all but myself and the Rhodians, and I had no need of such a token. The only possession of hers I retained was a small, battered feather I withdrew from her matted hair just before winding the sheet about her body.

I lay on the ground beside the grave and slept, a deep, dreamless, exhausting sleep, devoid of vision or meaning. Waking in the middle of the night with my tongue dry and my head aching, I stood and walked numbly to the Greek camp, passing unchallenged past the guards to the hut which I knew Xenophon would be occupying, from the pennant flying above. Stumbling in, I found him at work, writing at a crude table by lamplight. He looked at me without surprise or reproach, his eyes bearing dark circles and his cheeks still gaunt from the harsh journey and the even harsher suffering he had experienced since his arrival. He nodded quietly in greeting and welcome, glanced to the cot in the room that had long lain empty, awaiting my return, and quietly went back to his work. It was many years before we ever spoke of Asteria or the events of those weeks, when I was not myself.

So long in my internal exile, it had never occurred to me that he too might be suffering, for his loss had been double, and I cannot think about it even now without a shudder of regret. Self-preoccupied as I was at the time, I did not realize until much later that this was the first time since Xenophon's birth that he and I had ever been apart.