The Ten Thousand (29 page)
The bows were not only powerful, but enormous: as tall as a man, and when fired, they required that the bowman brace his foot against the lower end while drawing the string almost the length of his arm stretched out behind him. The arrows were as long as the peltasts' javelins, and in fact the Cretans, who were the finest javelin men in the Hellenic army, made a point of saving every such arrow they found and using them for just that purpose, after adding a small finger loop to each one for better throwing. We lost two very good men before we even realized the power of these formidable weapons: Leonymus, a Spartan, was shot by such an arrow, which penetrated right through his solid oak and bronze shield, his corselet and his ribs; and the Arcadian Basias, who to the amazement and dismay of all was shot square through the skull, the arrow emerging to half its length on the other side of his head, despite the fact that he was wearing a heavy bronze war helmet.
At one point, when the rear was being particularly heavily besieged, Xenophon sent word up to Chirisophus at the front to call a halt and send back reinforcements. The army's vanguard was several miles ahead along the road, and it took some time for messages to flow back and forth; yet when the runner returned he reported that not only had Chirisophus refused to send reinforcements, he had picked up his pace, spurring his peltasts and Spartan rangers on to a trot.
Xenophon was furious, though I tried to point out to him that Chirisophus was an experienced officer, and most likely had good reason to have advanced so rapidly. That afternoon, when we finally caught up with the vanguard below a summit where they had halted, he galloped straight up to Chirisophus, his face black with anger.
"Why the hell didn't you halt?" Xenophon spat. I rarely heard him speak coarsely, though it was a technique at which he was gaining more skill over time, as Chirisophus seemed to understand no other language. "My men-at-arms were getting torn to shreds back there by the Kurds' longbows and we had no shelter—we had to march and fight at the same time! By the twelve gods, Chirisophus, are we two armies or one? I lost two good men, one of them a Spartan, and we couldn't even make the fucking Kurds hold fire long enough for us to collect the bodies—they used them for target practice and laughed at us from the distance!"
Leaving the body of a fallen comrade on the field of battle is a grievous sin. Chirisophus, who was in as vile a mood as Xenophon and prepared to give as much as he had taken, suddenly became very sober. "Look at the mountains there, General," he said to Xenophon with a sweep of his hand, only a slight note of sarcasm tingeing his voice. "They're impassable. The Kurds have blocked up the routes tighter than a Scythian's asshole. There's only one way up, the steep trail you see ahead of you, and I was trying to occupy the pass before that mob up there seized it. The guides I've captured say there's no other way through."
Xenophon gazed thoughtfully up the mountain where several hundred Kurds were visible, busily rolling boulders and logs to the edge of the path, preparing to defend the route. They were undisciplined, lacking in order and coordination, and even their hastily arranged boulder defenses were scattered and slipshod. Still—there were so many, and their position was very strong. There was no doubt that we could take them and force our way through the pass—but at what cost, and to what end? How many more identical passes with identical defenses would we have to force our way through? Every man lost here would make it that much more difficult to break through the next roadblock, and the next, until the Kurds finally wore us out or starved us by sheer, mule-headed persistence.
The troops were becoming impatient, to either halt for the day or resume the march to a safer location. A blackness almost of night had descended, though it was only mid-afternoon, and the freezing rain had begun to fall in torrents, churning the road into a slurry of mud, chilling us to the bone. Xenophon turned to me.
"Theo, bring up the two prisoners we captured today and tie them to stakes for interrogation."
I did not like the expression in his eye or the tone in his voice, and I balked at fulfilling his request.
"Xenophon, this isn't necessary. Chirisophus' guides have already given us the information you need..."
He cut me off. "I believe I gave you an order," he said, his voice low and menacing, his eyes glaring at me, bloodshot from lack of sleep.
I stared at him in surprise, then hastened to comply and bound the prisoners securely to two adjacent stakes. The first of the men, a small, wiry, wizened fellow with a hard look about his eyes, confirmed the earlier account, swearing that there was no route other than the one before us. His half smile showed that he relished our army's making the attempt to assault the pass, and this infuriated Xenophon. Infuriated—perhaps this is not the best choice of words. The effect on him was more of a transformation, even an aging, as a hard look came into his eyes which I had never before seen on him, a look that bespoke his father, perhaps, or one of the Spartan infantrymen surrounding him, but not Xenophon. Xenophon, taught by Socrates to revere the sanctity of human life, and who, unlike the Spartans, loved war for its intellectual challenge, for its pitting of opposing minds, for the development of strategy; Xenophon, who though never shirking his duty, though unexcelled in wielding a spear and a shield, would never willingly seek out bloodshed for the pleasure of it—this Xenophon was changing before my eyes, becoming someone I had not known before, yet whom I always had. Of course he was changing—the transformation had occurred long before now, the night of his dream, the night he was acclaimed general. Qualities that had lain dormant in him, inherited qualities of leadership and command, coursing quietly through his blood, had risen to the surface that night, qualities of which I had always seen glimmers, tiny, latent specks of genius glowing like flakes of gold in a pan among the mud and gravel. I watched in wonder as they emerged and developed, creating a purposeful man, one who was hard and even godlike, from a man-boy who until now had been wandering vaguely through life.
But such qualities had a darker, more sinister side of which I was not aware, a ruthless side, a desperation that caught me off guard. I had seen it rise to the surface with increasing frequency—in his reaction to my questioning glance after losing Asteria the day before, in the fury on his face when he confronted Chirisophus about not halting to assist the rearguard. Now I saw his rage explode into a physical brutality that astounded me and left me more doubtful of his sanity, and of the fate of the army, than I had ever been before.
He inquired of the prisoner again where there might be alternate roads that could take us around or behind the pass, and this time the prisoner merely jeered at him, jabbering rapid-fire words in his barbarian tongue and broken Persian, which our interpreter refused to even render into Greek for fear of offending Xenophon further.
Trembling with rage, Xenophon placed his face directly into that of the prisoner, screaming at him to tell us the route, losing control of his emotions and his body. The troops nearby fell silent, embarrassed at their commander's loss of discretion, pretending to look the other way. The prisoner smiled coolly and tossed off a wisecrack to his compatriot tied to the stake nearby. Xenophon was rabid. Reaching out and seizing a shield from the nearest soldier, he brutally slammed the rolled bronze edge of the disk hard into the side of the man's face, knocking his head back into the post behind him. The man's smirk was instantly replaced by a mass of blood, his nose flattened against one cheek, and he howled in rage and pain, spitting bits of tongue flesh and shattered teeth out of his mouth until he could scarcely breathe, while Xenophon stepped back a pace and coolly watched the gore sheeting the man's face and dripping into a pool of black mud on the ground. Chirisophus stood nearby, gazing impassively and expressionless as the prisoner vented his rage.
After a moment, Xenophon shoved the interpreter away and then thrust his face back into the prisoner's, wordlessly, simply staring at him. I realized then that the man had become stone quiet, staring straight back into Xenophon's eyes, this time with all trace of contempt erased from his expression, his gaze filled only with malice and fear. The rain poured down on us, on those who were bloodied and those who were sound, making no distinction as to whom it might wash clean and whom it might bespatter with filth, and as I looked down at Xenophon's cloak, I saw that he had drawn his short xiphos sword, and that the tip was resting lightly against the man's belly just below his navel. I tried to call out but I was frozen, unable to move, the words sticking immutably to my tongue like a wad of flax to pine-pitch. I felt a thundering in my ears, the deafening chorus of Syracusan chanting I had so often dreaded, drowning out even the roaring of the torrential rain, and the outside world seemed to become silent and to move unutterably slowly.
Xenophon—you asked the prisoner your question one more time, slowly and deliberately, so quietly that only he could hear your words, though your language was unknown to him. To me all was silence, overpowered by the hellish roaring in my ears. I saw the man stare at you in complete understanding, despite the interpreter's absence, for this struggle of wills was no longer slave to the use of mere speech as a medium but had reverted to something much more primitive, more reptilian in nature, something more base and primeval than I had ever thought you capable of. The medium of communication between you and the man was fear and pain and hate, and in that language you understood each other perfectly. For after considering his options and the fate awaiting him, the man gave you another half smile, as best as he could through his split and bleeding lips, and then closing his eyes he slowly, barely perceptibly, shook his head no, and your fiendish knife did the work for which it had been created, for which it had been manufactured years before by the hairy, burn-scarred hands of a helot blacksmith in a sweltering Spartan foundry. The man's face wrenched in pain and he writhed like a live fish on a skewer, and as I watched, his eyes clouded over and he slumped against his ropes, his vacant orbs still staring at your feet.
Did you have any thoughts for Athens when you murdered a helpless, fettered man, Xenophon? Did you give any consideration to all you had been taught, to the ideals you had learned at the knees of Socrates, to the benevolence of the gods upon whose belief you sacrifice daily? Perhaps not, and in hindsight it was for the best, since your actions, both then and in the days to follow, successfully brought the army closer to its final destination. Men are needed in this world who are able to block out the fear and consequences of their immediate actions, to look beyond the sordidness of day-to-day suffering, warfare and squalor, to commit base deeds for a greater good. Men are needed like Gryllus and Clearchus, for it is by such men that civilization is advanced and the inferior is eliminated, or made beholden to the superior. Such brutal, unthinking men are needed; our most sublime institutions could never have been created without them, at least in some misty past that may be best left forgotten. This is one of the world's darkest, most unspoken secrets, for such is the evil—such the beauty—of war. The Spartans are trained their entire lives to close their eyes and their minds to physical fear and suffering and to seek victory at all costs for the common good. But they are Spartan, and you Athenian, or at least you had been until now; and I suddenly remembered the fervent wish I had expressed to the gods the night after Clearchus' head had been thrown into our camp, and I realized that it had been fulfilled in you.
XENOPHON DREW A deep breath, holding the air in his chest for a moment with his eyes half shut, and summoned every depleted reserve of self-control to regain his rigor as an Athenian noble and an officer. He then turned his attention slowly and deliberately to the second prisoner, who had watched the entire proceeding with eyes wide in terror. He was shivering violently, his teeth chattering and his knees barely able to support him, both from having stood cloakless for hours under the freezing rain, and from fear; and Xenophon had barely approached him before he began singing like a bird. The man said he would guide the army to an alternate road along which even the animals could travel, which would lead us behind the heavily guarded pass. A separate detachment must precede the main force, however, because the new route also passed under a height that must be occupied first, or nothing else could get by. He also confessed that the first prisoner had denied knowledge of that other route because his daughter lived there with her husband and family.
Xenophon turned away in exhaustion and nodded to Chirisophus, who called over the senior captains of both the heavy and light infantry to determine whether any of them would volunteer their units to follow the guide and seize the heights. Two Arcadian officers stepped forward to volunteer their two thousand heavy and light troops, and since by now it was late afternoon, they wolfed an early supper and slipped away into the blinding torrents of rain before darkness overwhelmed them completely. The surviving prisoner was bound and gagged and sent with them, while Xenophon and Chirisophus led the heavy infantry of the rear guard forward to the guarded pass we were facing, to draw the enemy's attention away from the Arcadians slipping behind and above them.
The Kurds had placed huge boulders in our path, and whenever a knot of our men gathered to try to lever the stones out of the way, they became targets for missiles and more boulders, some as large as wagons, hurled down on them from above. Xenophon finally ordered us to pitch camp when it became too dark to shoot our arrows, and he forbade all fires, for that would give the enemy too easy a target for their missiles. We spent a miserable night huddled in the cold, pouring rain with the warm campfires of the enemy clearly visible on the heights above us. All night the Kurds rolled their infernal boulders down among us, adding to the hellish atmosphere.
Meanwhile, the detachment with the prisoner tramped through the rain and dark and caught the enemy outposts unawares, destroying them utterly and seizing their camp. In the morning, the Arcadians blew a trumpet as a signal that they had taken the hill, and Chirisophus then charged straight up the main road with the bulk of the army, his scouts climbing the cliffs to attack the enemy defenders above, hoisting each other up the sides of boulders with their spears, to unite with the Arcadians on the heights.
Xenophon and his rearguard backtracked to join the baggage train laboring up the path the Arcadians had supposedly secured the night before. Alarmingly, however, every hill we climbed was occupied anew with enraged Kurds, and we would no sooner chase them off one than more would appear on the next, or on the one we had just left, flowing like water over and around the boulders and rocks, giving us no respite. On our own we could have easily climbed off the path and run the Kurds off the ridges above; but the path was the only means by which we could force the terrified pack animals and baggage through, and so we had a long and bitter struggle that day before the three dispersed units of the Hellenic army were finally united.
Though this battle was like so many others we fought on the march, I risk the reader's impatience by recounting it, because of a singular event that befell me. Xenophon was leading a charge up a rocky incline while I carried his shield. I tripped over a root, however, and rolled down a steep ravine, twisting my ankle and hitting my head so hard against a rock it cracked my helmet and knocked me momentarily senseless. Xenophon had been looking the other way and had not seen me fall, and when he turned and saw I was not there he became furious, thinking I had deserted him in fear of the rocks rolling down on us from the barbarians above. In part he was right, for I was terrified, as was every man among us that day having to fight boulders rather than flesh and blood warriors we could defeat. But as for deserting him—I was infuriated by his accusation, for in all the battles we had fought together, never once had I left his side, never had I failed to shelter him faithfully behind the shadow of my shield, even at the risk of exposing myself to the enemy. Another hoplite, Eurylochus, saw him standing in the field alone, and bravely ran up to cover him with his own shield.
When Xenophon later saw my swollen ankle and bloody head as I limped into camp, he understood and promptly apologized; I am not sure that I, however, have ever forgiven him his unfounded suspicion, which drove another thorn into my heart, contributing to the widening gulf being created between us.