The Ten Thousand

by Michael Curtis Ford

  This time it was Boy who launched first, and in a swift, catlike maneuver he dropped to one knee, seized Aedon about the legs before he could sprawl out of reach, and lifted him high into the air. Aedon, however, having identified his opponent's weakness, began repeatedly clubbing his injured ear with his fist. The mauling staggered Boy, who dropped Aedon in a rage, his ear turning a lusty purple and swelling into a shapeless mass before our eyes. Before Aedon could rise to his feet, Boy took two quick steps forward and landed him a terrific kick in the ribs, sending him sprawling onto his belly at the edge of the ring, gasping for breath. Boy eyed him warily to be sure he wasn't feigning exhaustion, then straddled Aedon's back, a crazed expression flitting across his face, masking the pain that had been evident since the ripping of his ear a moment before.

  Seizing Aedon once more with his arm across the neck, Boy dug the knuckles of his free hand into the side of his throat, against the carotid artery on the side of the trachea, in the choke that stops the flow of blood to the brain and can kill a man in seconds. Aedon's eyes glazed immediately as the sleep of death began creeping over him, and when he went limp, Boy released the pressure of his knuckles; but when Aedon regained his senses, Boy applied the pressure a second time. Gryllus leaped up in alarm and bounded over to his son, arriving just ahead of Antinous. Grasping Boy by the hair he pulled him roughly to his feet, allowing Aedon to drop to his belly in the sand, his eyes open but bereft of understanding. I carried him to his room, where I revived him with cut wine and a massage to the chest to increase the flow of blood to his head. Gryllus accompanied Antinous and his loutish brother to the door and summarily dismissed them, telling them in no uncertain terms that to return to his household would be their death.

  That night, in an awkward gesture of reconciliation, Gryllus came into Aedon's room bearing a bundle wrapped in a greasy piece of fabric. "You'll never be a pancratist," he admitted grudgingly, "so you may as well at least arm yourself well." He unwrapped the parcel to display a gleaming Spartan short sword, a xiphos, only slightly longer than a dagger but constructed of a tremendous heaviness, lending it a strength fit for years of battle. The weapon was not beautifully crafted-it was, in fact, rather crude in its finish-but it was well balanced and had a pleasing heft. The otherwise smooth, plain grip bore a primitively carved Greek letter K. Aedon stared sullenly at the blade, his face reflecting the confusion he felt at this unexpected gift from his father. Gryllus remained silent for a moment as his son turned it over in his hands.

  "It was given to me years ago, when I was a young officer accompanying an Athenian delegation to Sparta. All the Athenians and Spartans exchanged weapons as a gesture of good faith, and my counterpart gave me this piece."

  Gryllus paused for a moment as his mind went back to the days before Aedon was born.

  "I ran into that son of a whore many times over the years," he mused, "both on the battlefield and off. I learned the hard way that I couldn't trust him any farther than I could throw him in the pancration ring. That man's betrayals and broken agreements put ten years' worth of gray hairs on my head. Perhaps someday you'll be able to return the favor to a Spartan, by planting this sword in his gut. It's yours now; may you use it to good profit. I can't bear the sight of it."

  After Gryllus left, Aedon and I lay in our cots, sleepless. "Thank the gods your father stopped the match when he did," I commented. "Boy might have killed you."

  Aedon stiffened and raised himself up on his elbow, ignoring the pain that screwed his face into a wince. "Thank the gods, my ass!" he spat. "It was Father who insisted I learn pancration in the first place! Do you think he was ignorant of Antinous' grinding on me day after day? I'm sick of you always apologizing for my father, Theo, justifying his actions. You are a slave! What loyalty do you bear him?"

  Shocked at this outburst, I said nothing for a long while, until I sensed his breath had returned to a more even rhythm, that he had cooled down.

  "Aedon, you are your father's son, and he loves you as a father should. He simply is not a man to openly express such sentiments. Tenderness, to you or to anyone, is not an art that Gryllus values highly."

  "If he valued it any less highly I would be dead."

  Aedon again fell silent and I hoped that the matter was ended, but he was still restless, tossing and kicking at his blankets, his mind troubling him so much that it kept him from sleeping, even in his exhausted state.

  "What in the name of the gods possessed you to continue fighting today?" I asked him, attempting to lift him out of his doldrums. "You looked like you wanted to kill Boy."

  Aedon drew a deep breath, and paused for so long that I thought perhaps he had finally dropped off to sleep. When I peered at him, however, he was glaring fiercely at the ceiling, and even in the room's dim light I could see that his face was contorted in silent rage.

  "You wouldn't understand, Theo," he finally mumbled dismissively.

  "Understand? What's there to understand?"

  Another long silence.

  "Look, I just imagined Boy was someone else. It helped to focus my concentration."

  I pondered this warily, but my curiosity finally overcame my caution. "Whom did you imagine you were attacking?" As soon as the question left my lips, however, I regretted it, for I knew the answer as well as Aedon.

  He glanced at me with a look of disdain for my denseness, then turned his face to the wall.

  "Better I'd been born a bastard," he grunted thickly through his split lips.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ON AN OTHERWISE silent evening two years later, when Aedon was fourteen, he was awakened by a sound he knew was not proper to the house. As his personal servant, I was the only domestic allowed to spend the night in that wing of the house, and I had been snoring at the foot of his bed. Gryllus had left on a diplomatic mission several weeks before, resignedly charging his son with care of the household, and Aedon, hoping to please his father, felt this responsibility keenly. The sound had awakened him before me, and peering through the slats of the window he spied an intruder in the moonlit courtyard, naked but for a loincloth. He was smeared with a dark, greasy substance, and scaling the wall to the dining room he left a faint smudge behind, a dark blotch on the white plaster. Aedon snatched the short sword Gryllus had given him, and slipped silently out the room, determined not only to preserve his family's honor and wealth, but to live up to the trust his father had placed in him. Stealing silently into the dining room, he glimpsed the felon's fleeting silhouette just disappearing into the other wing of the compound, and he recalled even in the tension of the moment wondering how the fellow could be so familiar with the house.

  Feeling his way in darkness through the other door to head off the thief, he rounded the corner and collided with his adversary, who with his blackened, greasy skin and faintly gleaming eyes appeared like a creature from hell. They both yelped, but Aedon reacted first, seizing the other and muscling him to the floor, then rolling with him back into the dining room. During the struggle the slippery intruder escaped his grasp and drew a knife from his belt, which Aedon could see faintly glinting, subtle and lethal, in the near-pitch darkness. He could sense, perhaps from the other's irregular panting and jerky motions, that the fear was rising within. Aedon made a conscious effort to slow his own breathing, to keep his own terror submerged and to think, think hard, of what his father would have wanted him to do. Circling the thief slowly and silently, his eyes straining to see the other's movements in the blackness, Aedon suddenly threw himself at his target with his dagger raised high. He miscalculated the position of a stool on the floor, however, for as he swiped at his enemy's neck, he stumbled, his shoulder smashing heavily into his adversary, and he felt a blinding pain in the ribs. Struggling to regain his balance, he slipped on some residual grease that had rubbed onto the floor, cracked his head against the stone wall, and lost consciousness.

  I arrived just as Aedon fell, and was at first puzzled to hear nothing but the frantic twittering of the birds-had
n't I heard a heavy commotion in the room just seconds before? Feeling my way through the room, however, I tripped over a soft object, someone lying on the floor, and landed heavily on another. I felt the warm stickiness on my palms and bare knees, and realizing what it was an instant later, I raced out in horror, bursting into the cook's room and seizing the small oil lamp the cowering old lady had left burning for comfort. Leaving her shrieking in darkness, I tore back into the dining room, where the dimly lit scene left me aghast.

  With excruciating pain and difficulty, Aedon had pulled himself into a half-sitting position against the wall, and was watching in silence as the bright blood frothed and bubbled from his side, hissing slightly as it mixed with air escaping from his pierced lung. The furniture in the room was upended, and the greasy black culprit lay prone on the floor, his neck half severed by Aedon's single, lucky dagger thrust. His blood pulsed thickly from the artery in ever-weakening spurts, like that of a ram being bled for the ritual sacrifice, conjoining with the sticky pond forming beneath Aedon. As often happens in my moments of stress or shock, the wordless Syracusan chanting of my early memory rose from the dark recesses of my mind where it lurks like a bat in a cave, pushing itself to the fore of my concentration, and it was only with great effort that I was able to force it back and focus on the task at hand. Aedon's mother burst into the room and began wailing in terror, and the elderly cook, her wits now about her, attempted fruitlessly to extract the thief's blade stuck in Aedon's rib, and splashed water on his face from a small bowl to keep him from passing out again. The caged birds had stopped their raucous chirping and now solemnly watched the proceedings, not without, it seemed, a certain clinical interest. Not a sound came from Aedon, apart from his labored breathing. He closed his eyes, and through his pain managed a half smile.

  Because of Gryllus' position, though not without some misgivings, the family was able to secure the services of the city's most respected physicians. They soon had the blade removed from his ribs and prescribed a regime of poultices consisting of a concoction of ashes, spurge, and sour wine. For days afterward he was given to drink a beverage of bitter herbs that made him lightheaded and sleepy. I sent his father a hurried message by military courier, fearing that Aedon might die any day, and Gryllus returned home within two weeks, riding confiscated horses and navy vessels the entire way to speed his journey. Still wearing the dusty and sweat-begrimed clothes in which he had been dressed for the past week, he strode into the house without ceremony, pausing briefly to compose himself and to straighten his shoulders. With tears in his eyes, he entered the room where his son was recovering.

  "Son, you truly are a man," he said, clasping Aedon's forearm in both his hands. "You have acted to the glory of the gods and our ancestors. Athens will be proud to see you serve her one day, as will I."

  Aedon's face was expressionless, even wary, at this rare sign of his father's approval, but his eyes sparkled in a way I had not seen since he was a young boy. Gryllus was quick to allow the news of his son's bravery to be spread among his colleagues, and within days Aedon was swamped with offers for the services of the most renowned athletic trainers. His friends treated him as a god, or at least as a war hero, though he himself refused to discuss the affair, and shrank from all mention of it except by his father.

  Why such reticence to accept glory? During those months lying in bed recovering from his wound, and particularly after Gryllus returned to his duties a few days later, Aedon had all too much time to reflect on the fact that the intruder he had killed was not, in fact, a vicious murderer. The thief, as it happened, was Boy, who in a moment of greater stupidity than usual, or at Antinous' urging, had sought to take advantage of his knowledge of the house to expropriate a few trifles for his own use, and who had died still wearing his habitual foolish grin. Though Aedon bore no love for his wrestling opponent, still the lad was an acquaintance of sorts, one whose skin and hair he had gripped with his own hands, and a messy death had never been a consideration. Aedon had at first been in despair at this revelation. His only recourse was to harden his heart, telling himself that the simpleton had received fair sanction, convincing himself of the wisdom of placing glory and his family's safety over mere sentiment.

  I, too, had occasion during those months to reflect deeply on the event, and came to the conclusion that not one boy, but two had died by the knife that night; for in fact, young Aedon had not been revived by the splashing of cold water on his face after the stabbing. His cheerful soprano was never heard again in the courtyard after dinner, nor was his joking and flirting with the slave girls as they went about their tasks. His childhood toys and books were put safely away in a box. For in killing Boy, my master had also killed something in himself, something precious and innocent, a boy who in some ways was more orphan than myself. That boy was the only person my master ever killed who did not truly deserve to die, and for whose life of art and music he never ceased to despair in his moments of regret. Even his name was discarded by everyone, seemingly unanimously and simultaneously, as if a blood oath had been sworn, as if the deceased were not to be mentioned.

  Aedon was dead, and Xenophon was born.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE FIRE BURNED hot and bright, enough to make those closest to it wince when they faced it directly. A hundred pairs of young eyes gleamed from the darkness around it, some still blinking from the sleep from which they had just been roughly roused. Around us the light of the flames reflected blood red on the roughly cut stone walls against which we had been lined up, in a small amphitheater on the edge of camp that was used for harangues or weapons demonstrations. The flickering shadows cast by the squadron of newly inducted ephebes against the wall were strangely distorted-a black row of round heads and narrow, squared shoulders. They resembled nothing so much as a line of pegs on which to hang clothing, or a row of pins in a children's game, oddly swaying or jerking now and then as one looked to the side to gaze questioningly at his neighbor.

  We stood in silence. The day before, Xenophon, as a boy of eighteen who was now of age to serve in the military, and I as his designated battle squire, had marched under Gryllus' stern, proud gaze to the barracks built hard by the city walls. Now we had been awakened in the middle of the night. Xenophon and the other ephebes had been made to put on their newly issued chlamydes, the knee-length black cloaks that signified their status. We had been led here in silence by a burly instructor, his own face obscured in a full-faced hoplite battle helmet, his bushy beard emerging from beneath the cheek plates like some nocturnal mammal peering from its burrow. Only his eyes, gleaming from deep within the blackness of the visor, distinguished him from a shade risen from the underworld. For perhaps an hour we stood motionless and silent before the fire, watching as it burned down to glowing red coals. Our faces around it slowly faded into darkness until the only being wholly visible to us was the hoplite, who stood frozen in an erect, spread-footed guard stance, his eight-foot spear placed butt-end to the flagstones and held straight out in a ready position. Since arriving here, the man had not moved a single, hard muscle, and after the first few minutes before the fire, all our own rustling and movement had ceased as well. We trained our eyes expectantly and wonderingly at him, his armor glittering strangely in the firelight as if it were the living skin of some enormous reptile.

  Without warning, we were startled by a sudden blast of a salpinx, a war trumpet, directly behind us, and twelve more hoplites in full panoply, each bearing a flaming, spitting torch, marched in precision to line up before us at the glowing fire. They, too, stood motionless for a moment, as if surveying us, and we them. Then, as if on cue, they turned to the side, stepping away and stationing themselves at equal distances against the perimeter walls, surrounding us and bathing our faces in the lights of their sputtering torches. We eyed them nervously and unconsciously shuffled closer to each other in the middle, herdlike. Again we waited, in utter silence but for the low sizzling of the flames surrounding us. The ceremony, if that indeed is what
it could be called, was one of tension and suppression, of silence and waiting. Despite the open sky over our heads, I felt smothered and claustrophobic. Finally, one of the bronze-clad hoplites, taller and broader than the others and apparently their leader, stepped forward. His bearing and the tone of his voice indicated that he was a seasoned warrior.

  "Ephebes!" he bellowed in a gravelly voice, so loudly I could almost feel his hot breath, though I myself stood several rows back. "You have been called to commence your training as defenders of the polis. You are about to embark on a sacred mission which, after the requisite period of time, will have hardened you into hoplites worthy of the name, and of the black cloaks you now bear." I could almost feel the wave of excitement and anticipation as it rolled through the mass of boys now warily inching closer to the speaker.

  "Over the next two years you will train until your muscles ache and your body screams for rest. You will learn to march in phalanx, shoulder to shoulder with your comrades, straight into the teeth of the enemy, though fear gnaws at your gut and urges you to sidle into the shadow of your brother's shield. You will learn to stand firm, javelin in hand, though threatened by enemy spears and assaulted by Spartan curses, because you have taken a sacred oath to abide by the hoplite ethic, to not abandon the man standing next to you in the battle lines. This you will swear on your life!"

  The boys rustled and murmured in anticipation at the glory that awaited them.

  "But you are not yet worthy to call yourself hoplites! Before you can be trusted to fight alongside a man whose life depends upon your skills, you must prove yourself alone. As ephebes, you will be stationed to defend the outermost frontiers of the polis. You will skulk in the night and prowl through the woods at the very edge of civilization, to engage lone thieves and solitary attackers before you are allowed to fight in open combat on the broad plains with the phalanx. You have a sacred duty to learn to protect yourself and your comrades from the enemy! Does that mean being the strongest?"