The Ten Thousand (18 page)
When they arrived, the camp was a smoldering ruin. The camp followers wandered about like wraiths, seeking what shelter and food they might salvage. The king's troops had managed to burn or plunder over four hundred wagons of supplies, including most of the barley and wine we had so painfully dragged across the desert. Rather than the hot meal and sleep the weary soldiers had been looking forward to, they settled for filthy water, what few remains of stale bread had survived the plundering, and a blanketless rest on the hard ground.
But that was not the worst of it. For what Clearchus' reports soon confirmed to us was that Cyrus—the very reason for our long march, and our hope for guidance and supplies on our return back to Greece—had been killed. The Greeks had lost hardly a man in the battle, but we had lost our precious provisions, as well as our leader and benefactor. It was a long, cold night.
I FIRST SAW the faint moving shadow cast on the wall, even before its source, as the intruder slipped silently into Proxenus' tent and moved cautiously toward my cot.
So many officers' tents had been destroyed in the attack that Proxenus had invited Xenophon and me to move into his own lodgings until better arrangements could be made. Though his tent had been clearly marked by its pennants as an officer's quarters, it had somehow survived the Persians' rampage, and in this way even seemed to the men to be a positive sign from the gods, one of ultimate hope and triumph. As Proxenus passed the night with the other officers at Clearchus' own makeshift quarters, sorting through the day's events and planning their strategy for tomorrow, I lay alone, trying to empty my mind of the myriad thoughts and memories that kept crowding in. It was a weakness of mine, from which I have always suffered. I do not know whether other men experience this as well, for I have always been too ashamed to ask, and if they do, I have no doubt but that they too are unable to mention it for fear of being thought mad. I find that just at those times when I most require a clear head—just as I consciously try to clean away the cobwebs, all those extraneous and unrelated passing notions constantly intruding upon my concentration—it is precisely at those times, as if at a signal set by an impish god, that every possible stray thought, every fear, every memory of childhood shame, every twinge of remorse for friends now dead, every haunting echo of the ancient Syracusan chant that drives me nearly mad, all come rushing back into my skull like wind into a void, shouldering each other aside to come to the fore of my thoughts, jostling and being tripped up and muscled to the back by one another. It is enough to drive one mad, and one can see from the careening and jolting of my syntax that I cannot even logically explain the experience. I had been lying there, my overheated brain at the point of driving me to panic, when I saw through the lashes of my half-closed lids that the tent flap had opened slightly and someone had stealthily entered.
My head instantly cleared. Anyone entering this tent could only have been searching for Proxenus, yet in the soft flickering of the tiny oil lamp perched on my table I could see that it was not Xenophon, as I first thought. Peering more closely, my breath stopped as I recognized the intruder, standing stock-still, profiled in the light in the small space in the center of the tent, her eyes still unaccustomed to the dimness. I pulled back my blanket to sit up, and Asteria, startled, whirled around to face the sound. Her face registered shock as she recognized me, and she stood motionless for a moment, staring at me before stepping silently over to my cot. She was wearing only a light shift and a leather belt, and was barefoot, trembling from the cold, or from the horrors she had seen that day, or from fear as to what would become of her now that her master was dead and she was alone. I could see the dried trails of tears that had streaked through the layer of dust still coating her cheeks as she lay down in my arms, pressing herself to my chest and burying her face in my neck as she emitted a sigh—a long, shuddering, wracking sigh that seemed far too deep for her tiny frame, as if welling up inside her from some secret place, from some time long before.
I held her tightly, pulling the blanket up over us both and feeling her cold, shivering limbs gently relax and respond to my own body's heat. After a time, the spasms of her sobbing gradually subsided, and she lay quietly in my arms, awake and keeping her own thoughts, her long eyelashes softly brushing my neck with her blinking, and the damp, steamy scent of her breath and hair rising up to my face in the silence. She lifted her head, her face inches from mine in the semidarkness, peering into my eyes, searching my thoughts. By the dim lamplight I could see nothing but the dark silhouette of her long hair, a faint halo of light glowing behind it, the odor of charred wood and crushed flowers from her skin and hair oddly comforting. I put my hands on either side of her face, my fingertips in her hair where I could feel the broken shaft of a small feather, like a shattered lance, which she had woven into the strands, painstakingly sifted from the ashes of her burned possessions in an attempt to salvage some last remnant of adornment. I shifted my body slightly and turned her face into the dim light, to discern her expression. As I did so, I looked intently into the flickering shadows passing before her and revealing her, watching as the penumbra lifted from the depths between her brows and cheekbones. I waited for her eyes to appear from the darkness as does a seer fearfully observing the emergence of the moon after an eclipse, and feeling the same tremors and uncertainty as he would in divining the gods' intent. Eyes like hers had never before been seen, at least not in this world, and in the darkness their coloring, whether blue, gray or green, was unknowable. The true color may have been any or all of them, depending upon the quality of the outer light, or of the inner thought they concealed. Later, in the days to come, I would see them turn as black and unfathomable as the ocean depths when one peers over the side of a ship, and in her sleep, under her half-closed lids, the orbits would gleam a brilliant, gelid white, like a sliver of ice on an eave glinting both refreshingly and deadly in the sun.
She seemed to be questioning in her mind, divining the oracle, and she apparently received a positive response from the gods, for suddenly she pressed her warm, sweet mouth to mine, harder than I would have thought possible for one seemingly so fragile; and then I felt her moist, flowerlike lips gliding lightly, but with increasing pressure, over my neck and chest as I slipped off her thin garment, which had been tied with a belt holding an enormous, sheathed dagger, and I wrapped my arms around her, and we gave each other much solace.
I lay awake most of that night, watching as the fear and worry gradually left her tense face and her features relaxed into a blissful dream, or perhaps merely into nothingness, into an empty place where the absence of pain and fear, even of love, is the greatest happiness of all. I drifted off for a few minutes at a time, waking at the slightest noise, the discreet coughing of a sentry pacing outside, and then falling back again into a fitful dream. I was asleep, or so she thought, when she finally arose an hour before the first hint of dawn had lit the eastern sky. I watched as if in a dream, through barely opened eyes, as she pulled her shift back down over her slender body and tightened the leather belt around her waist. To this day, I am unsure whether I continued to watch, or had slipped back into dreaming, when she silently drew her knife, considered it closely for a minute in the semidarkness, and then carefully, noiselessly, not daring to touch me with her hand or sleeve for fear of waking me, brought the razor-sharp tip up to the pulsing, blue vein in my neck just below the jaw. Whether truly awake or merely dreaming, I feigned the deepest sleep, fearing that the slightest gesture or flicker of my eyes, the softest catch of my breath, would cause the dagger to be plunged into my throat. She held the tip there for what seemed like minutes, as motionless as one who has seen a gorgon, staring into my just-closed eyes, daring the slightest response. My soul slipped away from my body and floated through her, behind her, to the ceiling of the tent, and I could see her from above, leaning over my frozen body, the tendons in her wrist tense and quivering from the strain of holding the knife in perfect stillness at my neck.
A small drop of blood appeared on my skin just below the tip of the knife, pure and clean, virginal in comparison to the gushing, grime-filled gore I had witnessed the previous day, and seemed just about to slowly make its streaked path down the side of my neck, when it paused, as if to consider whether this was the best course of action, and began slowly to coalesce and gel. This I could see, by all the gods I swear I could see, as if I were a third person in the room, watching helpless and voiceless from behind her back. The drop quivered and hung, like a bead on a necklace, its increasing inner weight straining against its thickening surface, and my eyes from above were unable to focus on anything other than that tiny, malignant, reddish black globe, reflecting, upside down, the wavering flame of the lamp and the oddly distorted and magnified face of the girl. I could see from the reflection that her eyes, too, were focused on the drop as if in a trance, considering all the implications to her life and to mine that were represented in that silently swelling little mass, that tiny, pregnant bulb, which itself appeared to be endowed with growing life, rather than merely reflective of it, and of death.
Without warning she straightened up, bringing the knife again to her eyes and examining the reddened tip for a moment in the soft lamplight, before shaking her head as one does when waking from a deep sleep, and slipping the knife quickly back into the sheath at her belt. She bent down again, silently licked the tiny red drop from my neck with her hot tongue, and just as silently kissed my dry and trembling lips. She then slipped back out to the cold coals of her campfire, as wraithlike as she had entered, and my soul came rushing back into my body, leaving me gasping for breath and shaking in cold perspiration, sitting up alone in the cot as if waking from a nightmare. We had said nothing to each other the entire night, indeed we had never yet spoken a word to each other, but I felt my fate as entirely in the hands of this woman as of the gods, and I realized what an extraordinary, and damnable thing that can be.
BOOK SIX
His white head and gray beard in the dust,
breathing the last of his strong soul, bloody
entrails grasped in his beloved hands...
—LYCURGUS
IT WAS THE stench that finally roused me from my fitful dreams that morning—a smoky, sweet odor not unlike that of meat roasting for the sacrifice, but with an indefinable rankness, as of the burning of tainted flesh, of meat lacking in fat to absorb the heat and flame and allow the fire to cook the substance gradually, rather than rapidly charring it. I rose groggily from my cot, splashed a handful of water on my face from the skin hanging on a peg by the door, and stepped outside.
The morning sky, by contrast with the usual whitish blue palette that spawns and accompanies the desert heat, was today a glowering, malignant yellowish gray. The air was fouled by a vile, stinking smoke that hung low to the ground and drifted as if alive, swirling slowly in small circles, dissipating and coagulating, meandering serpentlike in futile paths that began in death and ended in reluctant oblivion. The churning haze effaced the life-giving rays of the sun, rendering it a dull scab-red in color, pulsing squat and malevolent in the sky, as if loath to make any greater effort to rise or to shimmer. For miles in all directions lay the flat, immeasurably dreary expanse of the desert, stretching unbroken to the horizon with hardly a tree or a range of hills to break the monotony. I had failed to notice earlier the dreadful endlessness of this terrain, forsaken of the gods, bereft of all interest, even as I had marched through it only days before.
As my eyes drifted away from the horizon to the nearer perspective, I saw that contrary to my first impression, the land was indeed composed of many features that had not been immediately apparent, like brush strokes on a painting, or the waves and currents of the sea as observed by the sailor, standing out in relief on the water's infinite flat smoothness. The earth was cracked and broken, split into random patterns that bifurcated and converged like a rash on the skin, strewn with gullies and washes, dry streambeds and low, withered shrubs. It was a foul terrain of pain and frustration, ground that had slowed my frantic return to the camp on horseback the day before. In the middle distance, just beyond a line of small hills that I could barely distinguish from its surroundings, I made out the vast expanse of the Persian army where it had halted in its retreat, massed like a milling column of ants stretching off to the horizon, the Persian battle pennants providing tiny spots of brightness and color on what was otherwise a drab, undifferentiated cloud of men and beasts. I shook my head to concentrate my thoughts, and focused my gaze on the specifics.
For miles around lay the detritus and destruction of the previous day's wide-ranging battle. Upturned wagons smoldered on their sides, their contents of grain and salted fish spilled and half torched, some still spewing a foul, greasy smoke. Spear shafts and javelins were spiked into the hard earth at crazy angles where they had landed, the ends swaying and quivering slightly as if curious, invisible desert gods were testing the depth and the strength of the shanks. My gaze ranged over the broad landscape, flitting sideways from fractured hill to withered clump of grass until I reluctantly, unwillingly permitted it to settle on the dark lumps scattered about the plain in numbers too daunting to count: the twisted bodies of lamed or trampled horses; the oxen and sheep viciously slashed in the abdomen or throat for no other reason than to deprive the Greeks of their sustenance and service; and perhaps least unexpected, yet most horrifying, the men.
Thousands of men, or former men, they were, though many were unrecognizable as such. It had been only a day since they fell, yet the furnacelike heat had cooked them where they lay on the hot sand, and many had swollen to twice their size with the gas in their bellies. Most lay deathly still, inert and silent as the rocks and crumpled wagons littering the plain. Others, however, hissed and belched in the heat, their limbs occasionally twitching and jerking. Their repose was further disturbed by the raucous cawing of crows circling and gathering in the sky above, summoning their courage for forays to the ground, aimed precisely at those dead whose inner workings were now most exposed to the heavens. I swallowed my rising disgust and forced myself to absorb the scene, to take in the changing details, noting as I stared that not all the bodies were prone and dead, but that many consisted of the black silhouettes of camp followers or soldiers, wandering aimlessly or kneeling or even sleeping in the fields, shoulder to entrails with the dead. An exhausted Greek follower half rose in sleep to slap at an overeager crow that had tested him with a peck to the eyes, and a bloodied Spartan, still in battle gear, sat up swearing and kicking at a stray pig that had begun rooting at his crotch. A filthy, robed woman rocked back and forth on the ground, her hands clawing at her face and hair as she moaned and keened wordlessly at an unidentifiable loss.
To my right a hundred soldiers and camp followers had organized themselves into funeral brigades, which had started pyres and begun collecting bodies for sorting and burning. Persian soldiers, many of them already half charred from the effects of the Boeotian engines, were stripped of any usable possessions and left naked where they fell, their flesh bled or burnt dry of blood and the skin on their faces a hideous, bluish white mask. A row of cadavers had been collected, fallen camp followers of Cyrus' army, who were being identified as best as possible and laid with a brief ceremony into the crackling bonfires by men robed and hooded in thick blankets to shield them from the intense heat and the stench. To my relief, I saw no armor of Greek soldiers in the rows of the dead.
Wood for the pyres was readily at hand, if only from the thousands of Persian arrows and heavy Egyptian shields lying about the surrounding field, abandoned in their owners' hasty departure. Intact wagons and carts, too, were available, and despite the Persians' attempted slaughter, hundreds of head of cattle and sheep had somehow survived the carnage of their brethren and escaped in the night, and were now wandering in the vicinity of the camp, bawling to be milked and tended. If there were not enough provisions to last the entire return trip home, we were at least sufficiently supplied to tide us over for the next several days. I wandered the camp, taking stock of our circumstances and searching for Xenophon and Proxenus. A cloud of dust had separated from the main body of enemy troops in the distance, too small to warrant alarm, but meriting my wary attention as it was intercepted by the Spartan scouts Clearchus had remembered to post on the approaches to the camp. I was soon able to make out an incoming rider at the outer periphery of the battlefield, unarmed and bearing a herald's staff. Since I was in the vicinity, I waited for him as he picked his way gingerly around the swelling Persian cadavers, and I then led him to Proxenus' tent, which for want of any better structure had become the informal gathering place of the army's officers.
Clearchus, who alone among the Greeks was in an unaccountably cheerful mood, came to meet him, and found to his surprise that it was Phalinus, an older, morose-looking Spartan who in his younger days had served under him, but had found the experience to be too trying, and had managed to arrange duties elsewhere. Phalinus had always considered himself an expert military strategist, rather than an actual fighter, and several years ago had convinced Tissaphernes to take him on in this capacity. He was said to be held in high regard even by Artaxerxes for his knowledge of Spartan military tactics and ways. Clearchus punched him good-naturedly on the shoulder.
"You old dog!" he said. "So the king hasn't sent you packing by now for your sorry performance yesterday! You must have him by the short hairs with all your stories about your great victories over Athens. Have you told him yet how you used to be my water boy when we were young
hebontes
training in Sparta?" Clearchus guffawed loudly at this, but Phalinus remained dour and stony-faced, his eyes bloodshot and watering from the smoke of the funeral pyres, as he refused to reciprocate his former commander's light-hearted greeting.
Phalinus waited silently for all the Greek captains to arrive, and then coldly called their attention.
"The king," he announced in an authoritative voice, "having killed Cyrus and plundered the Hellene camp, declares a great victory. He orders you to lay down your arms, and to beseech him for what mercy he might deign to offer you."
Utter silence. The Hellenes were speechless, and I saw Clearchus immediately flush, the scar on his cheek turning livid. He paused a few seconds to gain control over his anger.
"It is not for the victors to lay down their arms," he said slowly and coolly, gesturing broadly with his great, hairy arm at the immense field littered with Persian corpses. He then stalked off to complete a sacrifice he had been about to attend, leaving the other officers gathered about Phalinus, muttering to themselves.
Proxenus finally broke the tension. "Phalinus, you yourself are a Greek: speak to us openly and honestly. Is the king addressing us as a conqueror, or merely asking for our weapons as a gesture of good faith?" At this, all the captains spoke up, either shouting Proxenus down for his candor toward Phalinus, or attempting to ask their own questions. Finally an Athenian captain, Theopompus, a dandy whom I had seen one or two times with Socrates in the agora, managed to gain the others' attention.
"Phalinus," he said. "Put yourself in our place. Now that we have been plundered by the king, we have nothing but our arms and our courage. As long as we keep our weapons, we can still use our courage. But if we give up the weapons, we lose both. Could you blame us if we rejected the king's demand?" He smiled smugly at his compact argument, and waited for Phalinus' reaction. We all watched him.
Phalinus laughed tightly. "Well said, little Socrates! But logic will not advance your cause if the facts are against you. Courage or not, the king still has half a million men in the field, and that many more again in Babylon a few hours' march away. You are foolish to think there is anything you can do to check his power. I am a Greek too. If I thought you had one chance in a thousand to prevail against the king, or even to run from him and return safely back home, I would tell you to do it. By the gods, I've earned my own little stash of gold from the Persians over the years—I would even go with you. The fact that I don't speaks for itself. Ask your great philosopher what he would do in that situation."
By this time, Clearchus had completed the sacrifice and returned, his face black with the fury that had been building up within him. "Take this back to the king," he spat. "If he wishes to be friends with us, we will be more valuable to him with our weapons than without. If he wishes to make war on us, all the more reason for us to keep our weapons. The weapons stay, and will remain sharpened. And you, Phalinus, you ass-kissing son of a bitch: The next time I set eyes on you in my camp I will be carving your balls for my breakfast."
Phalinus smirked. "I am merely the king's representative," he said unctuously. "I can't tell you not to act the fool, Clearchus. But I have one more message from the king. He offers a truce if you stay where you are, but war if you move from this place, either forward or backward. Give me an answer to take back to the king: Will there be a truce, or will there be war?"
"Yes," said Clearchus.
Phalinus looked at him in confusion, then glared. "What am I supposed to tell the king?" he asked in irritation.
"That for once we agree with him. There will be truce if we stay, and war if we move."
But he did not say which he intended.
That evening, Clearchus ordered us to break camp just after dinner. When Xenophon passed the order on to me, I could not believe I had heard him right.
"Do you realize that Clearchus has just signed our death warrant?" I exclaimed. "We are only ten thousand—the king will have his entire army upon us by daybreak!"
Xenophon didn't flinch. "That may be—but Clearchus' hand was forced, by our own troops. Did you know? Three hundred Thracian infantry and forty cavalry deserted to the king this afternoon."
"Three hundred and forty? Couldn't their officers keep them in line until we all came to a decision as a unit?"
Xenophon hesitated, and looked away with an expression of bitterness. "Their own officers led them. And as soon as word of the desertion spreads through the army, there will be others."
I pondered his words. There was no telling how much longer Clearchus would be able to keep the army together in the absence of the common hope of plunder from Cyrus. A frontal attack on Artaxerxes, with badly outnumbered troops, was out of the question. Staying where we were with no provisions, while the king wore us down by delaying, would be to commit passive suicide. Our position simply was not tenable.
"Where does Clearchus intend to march us?" I asked.
Xenophon shrugged. "He sees no choice but to unite with Ariaius and the native troops, and to hope they remain loyal to us rather than to the king."
It remained unspoken, yet implicit, that moving from our present location meant a declaration of war against the entire Persian empire, as surely as our forebears had declared war on the king's own ancestors, Darius and Xerxes.
After a long march in the darkness, we reached Ariaius' camp at midnight. The officers immediately gathered around a council fire, and all of them, Persian and Greek alike, swore to defend each other to the death. At Ariaius' insistence, they sealed the pact by dipping their spears in the blood of a newly sacrificed bull, each man daubing a bit on the breast of his neighbor with his spear point as a sign of mutual trust.
Clearchus then spoke up, impatient.
"Now that we've sworn allegiance to each other with that spear-point bullshit, and recognize that we're both in the same predicament, what do you propose, Ariaius? You know this country. Do we return the way we came?"
Ariaius stared morosely into the fire a few seconds before answering.
"If we return that way, we're sure to starve. On our march here the countryside was a barren desert. For seventeen stages we had to rely on the provisions we brought with us, and now we have none." He paused again for a moment, in thought. "Returning by the northern route is longer, but it at least brings us through fertile country with plenty of villages, where we can take provisions. The key is to move fast, and put as much ground between us and Artaxerxes as possible. He won't dare to attack us with a small force, but if he moves with his entire army he'll be too slow to catch us. I propose we move quickly, while we can."