The Ten Thousand (28 page)

"But the king would have none of this. 'Courage, Gyges,' he chided. 'Do not take me the wrong way. I only wish to dispel any doubts you might have in your mind. Believe me, perfect white buttocks like hers are not seen every day, at least not by mortal men. I will manage it so that you will be able to inspect her beauty at your leisure, while she remains completely unaware that you are watching. Evil unnoticed by the victim is not evil at all, but merely a benefit to the perpetrator, and no one will be the worse for it.

"'Tonight, stand behind the open door of our bedchamber. When I go there to sleep, she will follow me. There is a chair close to the entrance, on which she will drape her garments one by one as she takes them off. She sleeps naked, and you, standing in the shadows behind the door, will be able to see her illuminated in the light of the lamp as if it were your own bed for which she was preparing. After she has finished undressing and turned her back on you to go to bed, you may stay and watch further, or slip quietly out the door without her seeing.'

"Gyges tried repeatedly to escape his master's request, but to no avail. That night, Candaules led Gyges to the hiding place, and a moment later the queen followed, carefully laying out each garment on the chair just as the king had predicted. Gyges watched in awe, his heart in his throat at the queen's beauty, which was more wondrous than he had ever imagined or than the king had described. He could scarcely breathe in his passion and fear, and his knees were so weak from trembling that he was afraid they would buckle beneath him and drop him gasping to the floor at the feet of the surprised queen.

"Shortly afterwards she moved toward the bed, and when he saw her smooth, white buttocks moving away from him, he cautiously slipped out of the room, in utter stealth and silence. Just as he disappeared through the doorway, however, the clever queen happened to glance back and see his shadow, and although she instantly guessed what had happened, she neither screamed nor gave any other sign that she was aware of her husband's and Gyges' terrible offense."

Again breaking out of character, Asteria explained to me slowly and carefully, as if speaking to a dense child, "Among Lydians, even men, it is considered to be a deep disgrace to be seen unclothed."

I felt my face heating up, as she paused and stared at me pointedly. All this time I had never been sure whether or not she had recognized me at Cunaxa as I watched her struggle out of her robe and escape naked behind the Greek lines.

"The queen mentioned nothing to her husband," Asteria continued, "but at daybreak, she summoned Gyges. She had often in the past spoken with him alone on official matters, and he was accustomed to responding to her call, thinking nothing of it. So this time as well, he obeyed her summons, not suspecting that she knew of his indiscretion the night before. Arriving in her presence, he knelt down before her with his head bowed, as was the custom in the Lydian court.

"'You have committed a foul deed, Gyges,' she said sternly, casting a baleful eye at the terrified soldier and holding the point of a large dagger to the back of his neck, 'for you have seen me naked, thus breaking the sacred mystery that holds between man and wife. You now have a choice. Kill the king, thereby assuming the Lydian throne and becoming my lord; or die now at my hands. In either case, you will never again obey my husband's unlawful orders.'

"'Poor Gyges remained motionless, in shock. Quickly recovering, however, he begged the queen not to force him to choose such a thing. But the queen had set her heart, and the more he pleaded not to kill or be killed, the harder she pressed the dagger to his neck. Finally, seeing no alternative, he gave in. 'If I must be forced to commit a foul deed for the second time in two days, then I choose to save my own life over my master's. Tell me how you wish me to kill him.'

"'You must attack him,' she answered, 'on the very spot where he showed me naked to your prying eyes, and you must wait till he is asleep, to ensure your success.'

"When night fell Gyges, seeing he had no alternative but to slay his master, hid behind the same door as he had the night before, this time with the queen's own dagger in his hand. The king entered first, as was his custom, and then the queen, who again, slowly and deliberately, took off each garment in the full light of the lamp, laying them on the chair as Gyges watched. After undressing completely she paused for a long moment, motionless, her full body visible to the watching soldier. He again could hardly contain his trembling from the combination of fear and lust, the two most violent urges that possess a man, both of them rising from the loins and up through the belly, feeding on and gathering strength from each other, constricting the chest, stopping the breathing, closing the throat, drying the lips and making the head swoon. The queen stood there in the light, as if giving him the opportunity to gaze upon her, and to strengthen his heart for the task, as he contemplated the reward that would be his after successfully completing his mission."

Again Asteria paused, staring hard at me with what seemed to be a mixture of desire and reproach. I reached my hand toward her face, but she shook her head distractedly, as if breaking a spell, and with a shrug indicated a note of finality.

"Of course you know the rest," she concluded with a wry smile. "Gyges stabbed the king to death in his sleep. Candaules' pale, plump wife passed into Gyges' happy hands, as did the kingdom, which was later approved by the Pythia at Delphi. Generations later, Gyges' descendant, King Croesus, brought on Lydia's war with the Persians and eventually its downfall."

This latter event was, of course, precisely the story that Xenophon had recounted to Aglaia on the road to Delphi so long ago. The chiastic structure of the sequences and genders amused me, but after a moment another thought occurred to me, clouding my spirits, and I brought it up to her only half in jest.

"Do you mean to say then, that since I saw you naked, I would have either had to have killed Cyrus myself and taken you as my wife, or you would have killed me?"

She smiled serenely. "You were ignorant of Archilochus; perhaps you know your Homer?

"Truly you are a wicked man, but not short on brains.

How could you say such a thing, how could you even imagine it?

As heaven and earth are my witness—I swear

I would never plot any harm to you. Trust me when I say

My heart is not iron. I have only compassion."

"You know too much," I muttered. "And it is you who are wicked. I refuse to play dueling quotations with a woman."

"That was Calypso, comforting Odysseus, in case you were unsure," she cooed sweetly, patting my hand, "and I would venture to say that it is not I who know too much, but you who know too little."

"Calypso was a nymph who nearly drove Odysseus mad," I said peevishly, "and I sympathize with him deeply. I asked a simple question. It is a mark of intelligence, not to mention good breeding, to say no more than is necessary but to tell at least what is required. You skirt the issue. Would I have had to kill Cyrus, to prevent you from killing me, my good queen?"

"Perhaps it is fortunate, dear Gyges," she said, "that Cyrus died the way he did, saving you the trouble. After all, I am Lydian."

At this she mashed her lips against mine in a clear sign that our verbal jousting had come to an end, for which I was grateful. As I ran my hands down her sides and waist, however, I was given pause when I again felt the large dagger in its sheath at her belt, which since her first night with me at Cunaxa she had never been without.

The next morning we felt the first frost of winter's approach, and as the pale sun rose we could make out a broad, open plain ahead of us, through the northern mountains to the country of the Kurds, and beyond that Armenia, a large and rich territory bordering the Black Sea where supplies would be plentiful. The Kurds, however, were a force terrifying to the troops. Word had spread among the men that several years earlier a Persian invading force of a hundred and twenty thousand men had entered the mountains to subjugate them, and not single man had returned alive. The only clue as to their fate was a donkey that had been set loose to wander from the Kurdish border back into Persian territory bearing an enormous sack on its back. When the animal was found by Persian scouts and the sack cut open they were horrified to find one hundred and twenty thousand human prepuces, dried and strung from a long wrought chain like those worn by Kurdish slaves. We hoped the story was an exaggeration, but it was impossible to say.

Xenophon offered sacrifice to the gods, for we feared that the mountain passes across the plain might already be occupied by Kurdish forces anticipating our arrival. The gods sent us an eagle, which circled the camp once and slowly drifted away over the northern peaks.

The army left at midnight.

THROUGH THE COLD clear night we marched in silence, each man keeping his own thoughts, each enveloped in his own fears. Terrified of hearing at any moment the thundering hoofbeats of crazed, fur-clad barbarians descending upon us in the darkness with torches and razor lances, we churned across the unprotected plain, and by sunrise we had reached the cover of the mountains. Even this shelter was deceiving, however, as we found in the days after. While traveling through the canyons and steep mountain passes, the army was forced to string out in an exposed line miles long, leaving us open to lightning attacks by small bands of Kurds, who would melt back into the rocks after their murderous raids, to the fury of our frustrated hoplites.

In an effort to reduce our vulnerability, Chirisophus cautiously sent squads of Spartan rangers and other light-armed peltasts ahead to determine the location of any barbarian raiding parties, and to assay the route for ease of passage. More than once, an unfortunate scout would return to camp a day late and half mad, holding his tongue or other body part in his hands, as a warning from a hostile band of Kurds he had stumbled across. The rest of the army fearfully followed behind this vanguard, picking its way up each series of hills, pausing to examine the countryside for potential pockets of danger and to allow the slower trailing units to catch up; then the entire force would seize momentum and roll quickly down the other side. Xenophon, as was customary, brought up the rear, commanding the hoplites and protecting the baggage, camp followers and the increasing numbers of sick and wounded, victims of the journey's hardship and disease, and of the Kurdish raids on stragglers.

When the gods favored us, our scouts were able to eliminate the Kurdish outriders before they could warn the villages of our approach and raise a general alarm. In these cases, the local inhabitants, caught unawares by the sudden presence of a foreign army in their midst, fled their villages into the hills with their wives and children, leaving soup boiling on the fires and goats wandering in the squalid streets, pleading to be milked as their tethers caught in branches and stones behind them. Provisions were available to us in quantity—cisterns of wine, huge brass pots in every household, livestock that far exceeded the numbers available to us in our own stores; but Xenophon gave strict orders against looting, killing or taking prisoners, except in self-defense. We spared the country in the fruitless hope that the Kurds might let us pass safely, if not as allies then at least as enemies of their enemy the king. We took only such provisions as we could eat in a single day, so we would not starve. We sent heralds up into the hills, crying out in eight tongues that we were not invaders and meant no harm; but either for want of fluency in the local barbarian dialect, or because of sheer hardheadedness and suspicion on their part, we could elicit no response from the Kurds, nor gain any assistance from them.

At night, whenever possible we camped within the confines of abandoned villages to take advantage of their fortifications, and we maintained a heavy guard. The displaced Kurds and their allies and relatives from miles around, who were clearly gathering into a larger, more cohesive force, lit hundreds of campfires in the hills above us. These looked like pinpoints of light covering the slopes of the mountains and receding in the distance until they blended seamlessly, but for their yellow tint, with the starry, sparkling skies around us, skies that were the same as those I had worshiped in my days of innocence in Athens. I do not know whether the Kurds were attempting to intimidate us by exaggerating their presence through so many fires, or whether they really did have so many thousands of men surveying us from the mountains, for by the time the sun rose, they had all disappeared, like so many shades summoned back to the underworld at daybreak, leaving nothing behind but faint wisps of smoke.

After spending one of many nights like this, during which not a single man got a wink of sleep except for possibly the most battle-hardened or brain-damaged Spartans, Xenophon summoned all the officers to his quarters. The expression on his face indicated that the news he was about to give would not be easy for him to impart.

"Gentlemen," he said grimly, scratching the lice-ridden beard he had recently grown to avoid the needless difficulty of daily shaving, "the Kurds are building up their forces and readying an attack. The scouts report signs of large bodies of men now moving as a single unit. We are ten thousand, but already a third of our troops are sick or wounded, and another third are occupied driving animals or forcing the supplies through. That leaves only one-third of the army as able-bodied fighters. The animals, baggage and camp followers are slowing us down, occupying men who could be defending our route. For the love of the gods, the camp followers number over five thousand, many of them women! They are dragging us to our deaths."

He paused to let this sink in, and to let us draw our conclusions. This we did, with heavy hearts, for without his explicitly saying so, it had become clear to us all since we had first entered the mountains that every extraneous ounce, every cooking pot, every crumb, every person that could not be counted upon to somehow further our progress, would eventually have to be eliminated. Even Proxenus' Boeotian engines, which Xenophon had faithfully dragged this entire distance over Chirisophus' strident protests, were ordered left behind, as being inappropriate for defending the army against the kind of warfare we were facing. The only exception to non-useful burdens was the wounded or sick soldiers, whom we would rather die defending than abandon. Many of the men had accumulated large quantities of plunder from the towns and cities through which we had passed since Cilicia, and since they had not had the opportunity to convert it to specie, it was still in its bulk form: cups and plates, decorative armor, slaves, rolls of silk and other precious fabrics; all would have to be discarded. And many, too, had developed intimate friendships among the camp followers, boys, women, and men. These were ordered left behind.

Heralds were sent through the camp to cry the orders, and the men and camp followers listened in stunned silence. One of the officers mentioned to Xenophon that he was afraid it might give rise to a mutiny or to desertions, but Chirisophus, overhearing, scoffed at this. "What option do they have?" he burst out angrily. "If those dickheads prefer to stay with their trollops and pretty boys, they'll see how far they'll get through those mountains alone. Let 'em desert. If they're so keen on fucking, they'll certainly be fucked when we leave them to the Kurds."

Orders were given to march after breakfast, and camp was breaking already, amidst the wails and protests of those being forced to be left behind. Even the Persians we had captured from Tissaphernes weeks before begged to be driven along with the army among the goats rather than released to the Kurds' devices. Women clutched desperately at the soldiers, some their husbands and others complete strangers, offering all their possessions, their very bodies, for a chance to continue trailing the army. Merchants and smiths pleaded frantically with Xenophon and stony-faced Spartans, arguing the army's need for their skills, their own willingness to take up arms or to care for the dead if allowed to accompany the troops. Livestock, sensing the rising panic and chaos among their tenders, ran untethered and unfed through the milling crowds, rooting through the forlorn piles of personal possessions being heaped for burning. I raced through the quarters of the camp followers peering into wagons, looking behind stacks of weapons and provisions, searching for Asteria. I was certain she must already be in hiding, perhaps pretending to be a sick or wounded soldier and wrapped in a blanket on one of the hospital carts. I tore through the carts bearing the injured soldiers, examining each suspicious lump under the blankets and finding no sign of her. I had no idea what I would do once I found her—and the situation was becoming more critical, as another set of heralds were already marching through the camp, announcing that an inspection would be held as the army passed a narrow spot in the road two miles down, to ensure that no unwarranted baggage was being smuggled through.

Asteria was nowhere to be found, either among her friends or in any hiding place I could think of, and my duties could not allow me to continue searching any longer. Returning through the Rhodians' camp, I spotted Nicolaus, his foot now healing cleanly, and quickly pulled him off to the side.

"Nicolaus, you heard Xenophon's orders," I whispered huskily, out of breath. "All useless plunder and camp followers are to be left behind."

He shrugged his shoulders and stared at me in puzzlement. It occurred to me that the Rhodian boys were perhaps the only soldiers in the entire army completely unaffected by Xenophon's measure, being too young to have wives among the camp followers, and too new in their battle positions to have earned any plunder. I grasped him by the upper arm to prevent him from leaving.

"Have you seen Asteria?" I asked.

A shadow of concern flickered across his face as he shook his head no.

The fear I had felt when Asteria first suggested defecting to the Persians weeks before rose up again in my throat.

"Have you seen any of Tissaphernes' scouts still tailing us?" I pressed.

Puzzled now, Nicolaus considered the question carefully. "Occasionally, yes, but only from a great distance. They are few in number, and prefer to remain out of sight, for fear of our slings."

"Nicolaus: In the name of all that Xenophon has done for you, in the name of everything you believe in—if you see Asteria, find me."

Nicolaus stood rooted to his spot, astonished at my intensity. I realized the grip I had on his thin arm must have been hurting him terribly, yet he said nothing as he looked at me.

I persisted. "Will you swear it?"

"Yes."

"By all you hold sacred?"

Nicolaus hesitated, and I realized what I had asked of this orphaned boy, exiled from his country, lamed by a wild animal, without an obol to his name. He smiled bitterly.

"Theo, go back to your duties. I'll let you know if I see her."

I trotted back to Xenophon's camp to find him saddling up his own horse in irritation. He threw me a tight-lipped glance and I could tell by his expression that he was aware of my loss—but he methodically continued his cinching and preparations, and when finished, climbed up on his mount and trotted off wordlessly to confer again with Chirisophus. His silence to me spoke volumes. I knew he had been voted general by popular acclaim, rather than appointed. He was utterly trusted by the men; he could speak to them and carry a sword like them. I also knew that he bore the burden of his duty to them like a permanent weight, like a battle scar or a trophy shield which to him represented a sense of honor more precious than life or love or his very happiness. An inviolable confidence would be shattered if he were to ever betray the men by breaking one of the rules he himself had laid down, or if he willingly allowed another to do so. I was his friend, his lifelong servant, his brother; my entire life I had forsaken my personal desires in order to serve and follow him, and he knew this, and I believe was grateful for it—but he would not, could not, make an exception for me. His duty was clear, and I would have rather driven my own sword into my belly than ask him to violate it. Yet even that might have been preferable to his silence.

The army passed through the inspection that Chirisophus and Xenophon had set up at the road narrows, and hundreds of pounds of surplus supplies, lame livestock, unneeded wagons and heavy baggage, and dozens more camp followers, slaves and captives were caught attempting to be smuggled past and were left behind, forbidden on pain of death from following the army. Soldiers involved in the smuggling were flogged, and the troops passing by averted their eyes from the scene, either in shame at their comrades' disobedience of orders, or so as not to attract attention to their own violations, large and small. The occasional good-looking boy or woman might get through, I was sure, in exchange for favors, and all I could do was pray that Asteria, in her cleverness, would herself find a way to do so unscathed and to somehow remain with the army; but I had no such hope.

The entire day and half the night we marched, twenty-five miles, as the enemy continued to slow our progress, skirmishing with us, rolling logs and boulders into our path to obstruct the wagons, throwing rocks from the steep cliffs overhead, pelting us with stones and arrows from behind trees. The men collapsed in exhaustion when Xenophon finally called a halt, most without even bothering to start fires or cook supper. The emotional pain of the morning, and the physical exhaustion of the day's events had done us in. He had still not said a word to me, but watched me carefully from under his brows. I, in turn, could not find it in my heart to say anything to him, in his unrelenting movement and action and confounded busyness. There was neither the time nor the occasion for any words that might lift the weight pressing on my soul.

The next day dawned stormy, with heavy winds and sleet; the men were exhausted, yet we could not remain where we were, without the shelter of a village and with no provisions at hand, so the officers made the decision to press on, hoping to find respite within a day's march. Chirisophus, as usual, led the van, with Xenophon guarding the rear, and enemy skirmishers attacked vigorously and from close range, not only with their usual slings, stones and rolled boulders, but with bows the likes of which we had never seen before, which threw even the Spartan men-at-arms into consternation. Composite bows they were, with the main shaft made of fine, stiff ash, while on the "belly" of the bow, by which I mean the inner surface facing the archer as he shoots, a thin layer of horn had been glued for further stiffening and resistance. More important, however, was the thick layer of sinew taken from the neck tendon of an ox or stag, which was glued to the outside of the bow, and which, when stretched as the bow was drawn, provided for considerably greater springiness and a much more powerful snap as the sinew returned to its original shape, than did a bow made of wood only.