The Lost Army

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  While our men were exploiting the opportunity they’d been given, I ran into a group of Persian prisoners who had just been captured by one of Socrates’s units and tied to the trunk of a sycamore. There was a girl there who spoke my language, and until recently she had been in the service of Queen Parysatis. I asked Xeno if she could join us, because she might have interesting information to share. In fact, I learned a terrifying story from her, the story of the implacable hate between the two sons of Parysatis and of their mother’s thirst for revenge after she had been so atrociously deprived of the one she loved most. Cyrus.

  12

  ‘WHAT’S SHE LIKE?’ was my first question. It didn’t seem real to me that I could be so close to a person who had looked into the face of a woman who seemed as remote to me as the stars in the sky. She’d even touched, possibly combed her hair . . .

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Queen Mother! Tell me what she’s like.’

  The girl who spoke my language was called Durgat and she’d been one of Parysatis’s servants until a few days earlier, in the Queen’s summer residence on the high plain west of the central Tigris.

  ‘She’s tall and slender. Her eyes are deep-set and very dark and when they turn on you, you tremble. Her hair is very long and she wears it gathered at the nape of her neck. Her fingers are long and thin and make you think of claws. Her nose is . . . beaky, sharp. When she smiles it’s even more frightening because everyone knows what gives her most pleasure: seeing people suffer.

  ‘And yet she can count on the loyalty and even the devotion of all those who serve her. She inspires such terror that if she pays the tiniest bit of attention to you or gives you some small handout, you involuntarily feel immense gratitude, thinking that for this time around, at least, you’ve been spared the pain she’s capable of inflicting.’

  ‘What was she doing here, at this time of year?’

  ‘She hadn’t come to take her leisure, not this time. She wanted to be close to the conflict. To the duel to the death between her two sons.’

  ‘How did you happen to be here, in these villages?’

  ‘The eunuch in charge of the royal household sent me and some of the other girls, with a number of guards, to buy provisions for the palace. Your soldiers captured us.’

  ‘I know, and I’m afraid you would have ended up in one of the soldiers’ tents if it weren’t for me. The man I live with is an important person. If you want to continue enjoying our protection, tell me what you know.’

  She nodded and seemed relieved. The fact that I spoke her language made her trust me. She told me everything she’d heard or overheard from the Queen’s chambermaids and from the eunuchs who had confided in her. She had a lot to tell, and we went on for days. The necessities of our onward march interrupted us, but we later managed to meet again and continue.

  ‘In reality, Cyrus thought he had a rightful claim to the throne; he didn’t think of himself as a usurper. He was younger than his brother but he was born when his father had already become King. Artaxerxes, his older brother, had been born when their father was a common man. Cyrus was a royal prince. His brother was nothing. There’s a story I learned at the palace, but you mustn’t repeat it to anyone. The Queen Mother would cut out your tongue, and mine.’

  ‘What could be so terrible?’

  ‘It’s about Cyrus. The Queen Mother won’t have him humiliated. So this is what happened. When Artaxerxes entered the Sanctuary of Fire for the royal investiture ceremony, Cyrus was hiding in a side chapel, waiting for his chance to attack. But Artaxerxes’s bodyguards must have been tipped off, because they searched the place beforehand.

  ‘They found Cyrus armed with a dagger and dragged him to the centre of the coronation hall so they could kill him then and there, before the eyes of the Great King. The Queen Mother screamed and threw herself in front of him just as the scimitar was about to lop off his head. She protected him with her own body and covered him with her cloak, imploring her elder son for mercy. No one dared to harm her.

  ‘Everyone at court thought that Artaxerxes would find a way to take revenge but, little by little, the kind words and attentions of his mother won him over and instead of doing away with his brother, he was convinced by her to send Cyrus as far away as possible from court, to the furthest western province, Lydia, and make him governor there.’

  I was moved by that story. The Emperor of the World, the King of Kings, the most powerful man on earth, was just a little boy to his mother, and he bowed to her will without a whimper. She was the one who fascinated me; what kind of a woman was capable of such conniving? Where I came from, we used to say that women like her had a ‘womb of bronze’.

  So, when Artaxerxes’s army and all his generals started to mobilize their forces against Cyrus, she took up her entire retinue, her wardrobe and handmaids, and moved towards the battlefield. She wanted to be the first to know the outcome of their clash. Any mother would be crushed by the thought that she would certainly lose one of her two sons, but not her. She wanted Cyrus to win, knowing that this meant he would slay his own brother.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Durgat. ‘She deserved to be punished, and she was. It was Cyrus instead who was slain, and she was spared none of the gruesome details. In truth, no one knew who, exactly, had struck him down. Several witnesses declared that the two brothers met face to face and dealt out deep wounds, each one lashing out at the other, but no one could say exactly when and at whose hand the prince had died, whether it was then, at the start of the battle, or later on.’

  ‘You know,’ I reflected, ‘our men weren’t even on the field when this was happening. They had already routed the enemy’s left wing and were in pursuit of the fleeing Persians; by that time they were far from the heart of the fight.’

  ‘One thing is certain,’ Durgat continued. ‘King Artaxerxes was wounded in the chest by a spear that pierced his breastplate and penetrated more than two fingers deep into his flesh. The Greek doctor who was later sent to negotiate with you stitched up the wound and treated it, but before doing so he measured the depth of the lesion using a silver stylus.

  ‘The Great King was informed of the death of his brother by a soldier from Caria, who showed him the blood-soaked caparison from his horse; he swore he had seen the prince’s corpse. When it was all over, the King summoned this man to reward him, but the soldier evidently expected a greater sum, and he protested. He even boasted that he’d killed Cyrus himself, and that such a small prize was not equal to his deed.

  ‘Artaxerxes was indignant, of course, and ordered the man’s beheading, but the Queen Mother was present and she stopped him. So rapid a death was not a just punishment for one who had been so ungrateful and insolent. “Give him to me,” she said, “and he’ll have the death he deserves. No one will ever again dare to show you disrespect.”

  ‘Artaxerxes granted her request. Maybe his desire to believe that his mother loved him and truly wanted to punish the man who had been disrespectful to him made him turn over the poor wretch. Instead, she wanted the satisfaction of punishing him all for herself. All she wanted was revenge. A revenge worthy of the evil and cruelty of her soul.’

  What Durgat told me then made me sick. There’s nothing more terrible for any human being than to fall completely under the power of another human being who hates him, because there is no limit to the suffering he will endure. At that moment, the delight she took in her revenge was greater than any pain or grief she was feeling for the loss of her beloved son. She had the soldier from Caria strung up in the courtyard of her palace and she called in the torturers. She hand-picked those who most excelled at their skill; those who were capable of inflicting all the torment a body can stand without dying. Those who were capable of stopping a moment before death arrived to claim her due and end the suffering.

  Every day she had herself carried out on a palanquin to the courtyard, where she sat in the shade of a tamarisk tree for hours and watched the atrocious agony of that poor creature.
Since his screaming and moaning had been keeping her awake at night, she’d had his tongue cut out and his lips sewn up.

  For ten days the abominable show went on until the man had been reduced to a shapeless mass of butchered flesh. The Queen let him die then, not because she felt any pity for him but because she was no longer amused; the diversion had begun to bore her.

  She had his eyes plucked out and molten copper poured into his ears.

  Durgat realized the devastating effect that her story had on me. My expression must have been eloquent, as I couldn’t keep the terror from welling up in my eyes. I’d never heard of such savagery, growing up in my sleepy little village. She stopped for a while and took a look around, as if to reacquaint herself with the reality of the present. Then she went back to the past.

  ‘There was another man who boasted of having killed Cyrus. His name was Mithridates. He had been given a handsome reward by King Artaxerxes: a silken gown and a scimitar of solid gold because he had actually wounded the prince with a javelin blow to his temple, although it had been the King, everyone said, who dealt the final blow, despite his own wounds. Others claimed that it was Mithridates, not the soldier from Caria, who showed up with Cyrus’s bloody caparison, thus proving himself deserving of the King’s gifts.

  ‘One evening Mithridates was invited to a banquet secretly organized by the Queen. One of the eunuchs in her service was there as well. The wine flowed abundantly and when the guest seemed good and drunk the eunuch began to taunt him, saying that anyone could bring a bloody caparison to the King, without being a great warrior. That was all it took. Mithridates lifted his hand and shouted: “You can blather all you like, but this is the hand that killed Cyrus.”

  ‘ “What about the King?” asked the eunuch.

  ‘ “The King can say whatever he likes. I was the one who killed Cyrus!”

  ‘In saying this, he had accused the King of being a liar. In front of twenty or so witnesses. In other words, he signed his own death sentence.

  ‘When they saw the eunuch’s satisfied grin, the others understood what was in store for Mithridates. They dropped their eyes, and the master of the house said, “Such big talk! Let’s leave these matters to others and worry instead about eating and drinking and enjoying ourselves tonight. No one knows what tomorrow may bring!”

  ‘Mithridates’s death was orchestrated by the Queen Mother who, once again, asked her son to allow her to avenge his offended honour. Mithridates’s friends tried to get him out of trouble using the excuse that he was drunk, but the eunuch quoted the old adage about there being truth in wine, claiming that under the influence of drink one speaks the truth. None of those present at the banquet dared to disagree.

  ‘Parysatis devised an even more perverse end for Mithridates: the torture of the two chests.’

  At the thought of having to listen to more atrocities I begged Durgat to interrupt her story because I had neither the courage nor the strength to listen, but a voice I knew well rang out behind me.

  ‘Well, I am curious to hear about it, and I know you know enough Greek to make yourself understood. I heard you speaking when our men captured you.’

  Menon of Thessaly was standing behind me, and perhaps had been there for some time, although I hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Get out,’ I said. ‘Xeno could be back at any time and he won’t like it if he finds you here with me.’

  ‘I’m not doing anything wrong,’ replied Menon. ‘And I know you’re a friend of Melissa’s, that gives us something in common.’

  He was holding a cup of palm wine in his left hand. The cup was made of fine ceramic, like those that the Greeks use when they take their meals. I’ve never been able to understand how he kept his cloak so white and how such rare, delicate items could travel with him without being damaged. The girl went on speaking in Greek: I had not expected that, and was really surprised. She must have been a precious commodity at the Queen’s court. I turned to leave.

  ‘Too tender-hearted or too weak-stomached to listen?’ commented Menon sarcastically. ‘You’re not familiar with the torture of the two chests? I’ll tell you about it myself. You know, before we left I had to brush up on the habits and customs of these countries, just so that I’d know what to expect if I was taken prisoner. This is what she’s talking about. They take you out into the middle of the desert, someplace where the sun beats down all day long. They tie your hands and your feet and put you into a kind of chest, you know, the ones they use for leavening bread dough. Just big enough to contain you sitting down. Then they place another chest on top of that one, only this one has the end cut out so that your whole head sticks out of it. Then they spread a thick paste of milk and honey all over your face. That’s just the thing for flies, wasps, horseflies, you name it. They come from every direction to enjoy the meal and so in moments your face is completely covered by those revolting insects. But that’s not all. Spiders, centipedes and beetles all come to join in the fun. And ants, thousands of starving ants. You can’t move because you’re closed up in that wooden coffin, and once the honey is finished, the insects don’t stop. They continue on your face and in no time at all, they’ve turned it into a bloody mask.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ I shouted.

  ‘Leave if you want,’ replied Menon. ‘No one asked you to stay.’ But I did stay. I don’t know why but that horror had a strange effect on me, like a poison that slowly makes you drowsy yet torments you at the same time. I realized that human beings were capable of doing this, and worse. I couldn’t walk away, it wasn’t right. I had to be aware of everything that life may hold in store. Your existence can be totally serene, I thought, you might be blessed with children, a person who loves and respects you, a lovely house with an arbour and a garden, like the one I’ve always dreamed of. And yet something can happen that will make you forget about the happiness of a lifetime in a matter of hours, and make you sorry you were ever born.

  Menon’s voice continued, soft and low, telling his cruel story. ‘. . . And that’s still not all. Every evening, when night and darkness liberate you for a brief time of those teeming hosts, dinner time comes around. They feed you, yes they do . . . can you believe that? Drink, too. Lots of it. They force it down your throat. If you won’t open your mouth they pierce your eyes with pins, so that when you scream they can stuff more food into your mouth, and make you drink. So that after two or three days you are buried in your own excrement inside of that boiling coffin. The worms devour you alive, little by little. You can smell the stench of your own dying flesh and you curse your heart that keeps on beating and you curse your mother who brought you to life and you curse all the gods in the heavens that she didn’t drop dead before she spat you into the world.’

  I wept as I listened to his story. Such horror! I thought that even that poor wretch had been born of a mother who nursed him, held him in her arms and covered him with kisses and caresses, ensuring that his childhood would be filled with all the joy a child can have, not realizing that it would have been much better for him had she drowned him in a bucket as soon as he was born, before hearing his first wail.

  It took Mithridates seventeen days to die.

  The story wasn’t finished. Durgat said that there was one more man who still had to pay his dues. The eunuch who had taken it upon himself to decapitate, maim and impale Cyrus’s lifeless body. His name was Masabates and he was as wily as could be. He’d seen the way the other two had ended up and he realized that he was choice prey for that tiger. Not only was he careful to do no boasting, but he avoided any situation in which talk turned to Cyrus and shied away from any person who had had anything to do with anyone who had ever known Cyrus or even remembered him in any way. If the discussion strayed in that direction he simply left, alluding to one of the many tasks he was responsible for as a loyal and emasculated servant of the King. It seemed impossible to trap him, but the man-hunter was more cunning than he was. She let time pass, and began to behave as if Cyrus had never existed. She surround
ed her surviving son with tenderness and solicitude, even making sweets for him with her own hands, or so she’d have him believe. She seemed sincere. She played the part of a mother resigned to the fact that only one son remained for her to shower her affection on. The one thing that truly melted the King’s heart was the kindness and warmth the Queen Mother had begun to show for her daughter-in-law, Artaxerxes’s beloved bride Queen Statira, whom she had never been able to abide. Parysatis even found time to join the King in his favourite pastime: throwing dice.

  ‘I’ve never heard of anyone using loaded dice for the purpose of losing,’ Durgat told us, ‘but that’s exactly what the Queen Mother did to achieve her goal. She bet one thousand gold darics and lost them all. She paid this enormous sum without batting an eye but requested a return game, which took place a few days later, one quiet evening after dinner in the garden of the summer palace. A fountain burbled softly and a nightingale warbled his song from the jasmine-scented hedges.

  ‘This time around it was Parysatis’s turn to name the stakes, and she decided they should play for a servant. A servant owned by whoever lost. Each of them could rule out five names, choosing from their most loyal and devoted servants, so as not to be deprived of a person close to their hearts.