The Ten Thousand

by Michael Curtis Ford

  Xenophon shouted frantically for someone to fetch a camp surgeon, but with his loss of blood and the corruption of his spilled bowels, it was clear that faithful Nicarchus had but a few minutes of life left to him. I hastily laid a cloak on the ground behind him and helped him to recline in a more comfortable, almost fetal position that would not put too much strain on what must have been an extraordinarily painful wound. How the man bore it as long as he did was beyond my comprehension.

  "Nicarchus, by the holy gods, speak! What happened? Where are Clearchus and the other officers?"

  By this time, word of Nicarchus' arrival had spread through the neighboring tents, and a growing crowd was pressing in on us, shouting and gesturing.

  "Xenophon… they're gone! By the gods, they're gone, all of them!" Nicarchus struggled to keep focused, to hold his gaze and stay conscious. "Clearchus and the captains went in the main tent, and the rest of us stayed outside…"

  He choked on the blood rising up in his throat, spilling out blackly from the corners of his mouth, and gasped for breath again.

  "There was a signal, and then the Persians all drew swords and cut us down. I… I managed to flop across a horse and ride back here, but the others…" Poor Nicarchus by this time was weeping soundlessly, his voice growing fainter. "I should have stayed with them! Maybe I could have helped…"

  I squeezed the dying man's hand and reassured him that without his brave return, our camp could never have been alerted, and might have been destroyed in its sleep. As grievous as Nicarchus' condition was, we had no time to spare. Xenophon was staggered at the shock of what he had just seen and heard. He shouted to the surrounding men. "Battle stations! Everyone assume battle stations! Form a box around the baggage and wagons, heavy armor in front, camp followers in the middle. Engine men! Light coals and place the Boeotian engines in the front!" He arranged what few bowmen and targeteers were available at the entrance to the camp to serve as an early warning, and then I helped him to strap on his own cuirass and helmet before clambering up the makeshift lookout tower to see what might be happening at the Persian camp. It had not even occurred to him that he hardly had the rank to be ordering an army of ten thousand men into battle position; but he saw no other superior officers available, and the men, in their shock at the news, were desperately seeking someone to take charge, and to assign them tasks to keep busy.

  In the distance, toward the Persian camp, hundreds of torches and fires had been lit. No enemy forces were advancing that I could see, but great numbers of horsemen were galloping about in random patterns, and periodic shouts, cries of jubilation, and screams of agony were faintly carried over by the wind. I saw that most of the activity appeared to be centered near the river, where the nightly market was held, and I feared the worst for the two hundred soldiers who had gone to the Persian camp to procure supplies for the army.

  The Hellenes remained at post, terrified of an imminent attack which did not, in fact, materialize. What did arrive was a body of three hundred horsemen, who suddenly broke out of the chaos and fire of the Persian camp, and galloped towards us, heavily armored and in battle formation. Xenophon stalked over to the sentry posts at the front entrance to the camp, and raised a flag of truce to stop them and discover their intent.

  As the party of cavalry approached I saw that they were led by Ariaius, Artaozus, and Mithradates, Cyrus' closest friends among the allied army. Xenophon's interpreter, who had arrived breathless behind me, also pointed out Tissaphernes' brother, who kept his face shadowed in a visor and helmet behind Ariaius, but who seemed to be in communication with him and the other two officers. The band drew up their horses in front of Xenophon, looked down disdainfully, and then called for a captain to whom they could deliver the king's message.

  Xenophon stared at Ariaius with scorn, that he could have so faithlessly betrayed his Greek comrades, and then sent the interpreter into camp to identify any captains who might have remained behind when Clearchus departed. He came running up a few minutes later with Cleanor and Sophainetos, who had been busy arranging the engines and troops and had not seen the approach of the horsemen. They were the only captains remaining in the camp.

  "Hellenes, you dogs!" shouted Ariaius. My neck bristled. "Clearchus broke his oath and the truce, and has now been justly punished with death! But Proxenus and Menon, who faithfully reported his breach and his plot, are even now being honored by the king! The king demands, and Proxenus and Menon support him in this, that you lay down your arms immediately and surrender the camp. All that you have is his, says the king, for it belonged to Cyrus, who was the king's brother and slave."

  At this, the Hellenes roared in outrage, the sentries clattering their shields with their spears and raining insults down on the heavily armed Persians. The situation had the potential to evolve for the worst. Finally Cleanor raised his shield and bellowed for silence, as ranking officer present:

  "You goat-fucking wretch of a Persian slave, Ariaius! You dare to come riding here with your shit-eating ass-kissers, to the Greeks who saved your hide at Cunaxa, and demand that we surrender to your treachery? Have you no shame before real men? Do you not fear the gods, for having broken a solemn pledge, for having betrayed us to your monkey-faced Tissaphernes and his eunuch of a brother? You murdered the very man to whom you swore allegiance, and joined our enemies! May you die a filthy and godforsaken death at the hands of those you betrayed!"

  Ariaius smiled thinly at Cleanor's threats, and I could see Tissaphernes' brother muttering something to him from behind, his eyes glittering in a cold rage. Xenophon raised his hand for quiet and spoke up in an effort to ward off the imminent riot. "So Clearchus has been punished. If he did betray his word, then he deserved his punishment. But what about Proxenus and Menon, Ariaius? They are our generals. If they are truly safe, send them here-they are friends with both sides, and it is they who should be negotiating any surrender of the Hellenes to your forces."

  The Persians discussed this among themselves in their barbarian tongue, in voices so low that our interpreter could not catch their meaning. Then they rode away without saying a word.

  Xenophon stared bleary-eyed at the bundle tossed at our tent the next afternoon by a lone Persian rider, who had swiftly turned heel and raced galloping back to his camp. Hellenic informants from the Persian camp had told us that morning that rather than being honored by the king, Proxenus and Menon had, in fact, been hog-tied, dragged by their feet behind horses to the king's tent, flayed alive of what little skin was still left on their bodies, and beheaded. The two hundred soldiers procuring supplies at the market had suffered a somewhat quicker fate, as they had been cut down almost immediately upon a signal, by armed Persian soldiers manning the market stalls.

  Half mad with grief, surrounded by confused and terrified men, wondering what would befall us next, Xenophon asked me to slit open the parcel. We found to our horror that it contained Clearchus' head, his long Spartan braids coiled around it, and obvious signs of his having been brutally beaten before his death. After a day in the hot, humid weather, covered only with a thin papyrus wrapping, the head was already badly disfigured, the eyeballs shriveling, the lips bluish, and the skin swollen. The perpetually angry scar on his temple that had so terrified his men was now pure white on the bloodless skin. Flies buzzed about lazily, waiting for me to again leave them to their business. I felt an unutterable loneliness and sadness. The Syracusan chants from my childhood, which had not tormented me for some time, welled up inside; they were threatening and pressing, and it was only with great effort that I was able to push them aside, shunt them off to a corner of my mind, and focus on the terrible business at hand.

  After securing the camp the night before, our immediate task had been to put the souls of the murdered men to rest-which would be difficult, as we were unable even to place the customary obols in their mouths to pay the boatman Charon, or to oil their bodies for burial. The Persians kept their remains and no doubt performed atrocities on them, as they had on Clea
rchus'. We held a hasty ceremony, improvising eulogies, sacrificing a precious ox in their honor, and burying a single effigy in a grave, representing all the men who had died that evening.

  Oddly enough, despite my grief at Proxenus' death, I felt my thoughts returning again and again to Clearchus, and to the terrible loss we had suffered by his treacherous assassination. I had not loved the man; he was incapable of giving love, and would have viewed receiving it as the worst of weaknesses. In fact, I hated him for his arrogance, his testiness, his complete inability to accept compromise and any philosophy other than "might makes right." Nevertheless, I had worshiped him in a way, as one does a harsh god, as a small boy does an overly severe father. I had thought the man to be practically immortal or indestructible, and I was unable to reconcile my mind's vision of Clearchus with the bruised, rotting head lying like a discarded cabbage in a sack in the dust.

  In any land but Sparta he would have been crowned king, and have been remembered in history as one of the greatest and most brutal. But he was from Sparta, the only land in the world where such men are in surfeit, and he was Clearchus, the only man in the world more Spartan than even the Spartans, and therefore destined, perhaps, to a death more tragic than Sparta's itself. As unlikely as an encomium to such a man may be, Clearchus, no less than any other of the personages populating this halting record, deserves to be remembered for his accomplishments and excused for his shortcomings, even if belatedly by fifty years. His body was dead, but I prayed, for the sake of our very survival, that his spirit would remain with us some while longer, and settle on a man worthy of bearing it.

  BOOK SEVEN

  DREAMS AND STONES

  … from deep, chaotic beds of mortal sleep

  The gods darkly revealed what erst had been,

  and what is now, and what shall follow yet.

  – EURIPIDES

  CHAPTER ONE

  WE SLEPT A restless sleep, each dreaming his own dreams, for dreams, like Muses or men, bear a superficial similarity to one another, but are never truly alike. It is as confounding to say, "I dreamed of a man," as to say, "I felt the sun." The first statement tells us nothing useful about the man, nor the second whether the sun was the benign orb that sustains our existence, or the harsh, killing fire that parches our throat and saps our strength if we attempt to defy it. A dream is the dreamer's alone, and no one can know its meaning without knowing the fears and aspirations of the dreamer. We shift from the dreamer to the dream, from the man to the Muses, seeking to reconcile the halves, to make them one, though dreams, by their very nature, are rarely consistent. Nor, for that matter, are men.

  Some call dreams the ruminations and calculations of the unconscious mind, as the spirit assumes control over the intellect, unhampered by pain and the pleasure-seeking conceits of the mortal body. Others claim that dreams are direct messages from the gods, capable of being received only when both the body and the mind are lying dormant and vulnerable. A man takes his life into his hands each night in sleep, as he plunges unarmed and naked into a fast-flowing river of changing perspective, where not even the beating of his heart or the rhythm of his breath would be sufficient to sustain him if he were in his wakeful state. In sleep, the dead sometimes venture into his presence, to entice him to cross or to urge him back to his suffering and worldly condition. It is no accident that Hypnos, blessed god of Sleep, is joined by birth to a twin with whom he works in deep collusion-Hades the Winged One, God of Death.

  It is strange that we think so little about sleep, even cursing it for diminishing the useful time available to us. Perhaps a certain humility is required to appreciate such a gift, a humbleness not native to the spirits of most men. When asleep, the philosopher and the traitor are scarcely different from each other, a king can hardly be distinguished from the beggar outside his door. Only the gods, who see of what things dreams are made, could tell the difference, if they cared to.

  And who knows? To the extent that the deities are too preoccupied with their own petty squabbles to concern themselves with the daily lives of humans, to the extent that a man actually controls his own destiny, a man's mind, particularly his sleeping mind unburdened by physical weakness, is his god, and a dream the act and consequence of reasoning unbiased by material concerns. Whether sent from outside by the deities, or created from within by a man's own godlike spirit, a dream is a frightening thing to receive, its mandates not to be taken lightly.

  Perhaps most frightening is to be sent a dream such as one has not received in years-since childhood perhaps, when the boundaries between one's physical and spiritual worlds are less solid, and dreams and their recollection more forthcoming-to be sent such a dream, and to not know what its mandate is. For such was the dream Xenophon received in his restless sleep the night after Clearchus' death, as he collapsed at my side before the fire. One would think that a dream so portentous and vivid would have been clear in meaning as well, yet to this day I cannot say whether it was an evil omen, or a sign of hope that the gods were watching and would guide us.

  "I saw myself standing outside my father's house," he told me, "not at Erchia or Athens, but on a vast, treeless plain-alone-a plain covered in asphodel.

  "Huge thunderheads had rolled in," he continued, "but they were not the heavy gray of rain and storms. They were the brightest, most brilliant white, and the warm sun shone down on me, heating my scalp and my aching shoulders with its soothing fingers. I felt surrounded by peace and calm. Looking up, I could see the serene face of Zeus in the thunderheads, a magnificent presence dominating the entire heavens, gazing down on me and smiling gently. I felt overwhelmed by his love and approval.

  "But while I stood motionless, watching the god in awe, I saw his huge face suddenly crack into a grimace, with a mouth full of rotten teeth and a livid scar along the temple. Black Spartan braids blew from the back of his head as if in a high wind. As I watched, a thunderbolt shot from the god's eyes, hurtling down to earth with a whine and a hiss like that of a hundred lead missiles hurled from enemy slings. They struck my father's house with a blinding explosion, leveling it in an instant and setting all around me to blazing."

  For long minutes afterwards his eyes remained wide, and after taking a long swig from a wineskin to settle his nerves, he stoked the fire, wrapping himself in a cloak against the damp, late-night chill. I repeated his dream silently to myself, searching for an answer as to what it might mean. On the one hand, it seemed a good sign, that despite all the dangers through which we were passing, we were still surrounded by the light and benevolence of the gods, and Zeus was watching us from the heavens; yet the dream was also to be feared, because Xenophon was certain it had been sent by Zeus himself, and portended the destruction and ruin that would result from any attempt to leave this place.

  I broke my head with him over this conundrum for an hour, but I am no seer, and have little imagination or skill, much less patience, at divining the meanings of dreams. The thought that kept coming to mind with increasing urgency, however, had little to do with the sorcery of Xenophon's unconscious mind that night, and everything to do with the tactile, fleshy reality of the situation at hand. I found I was becoming disgusted at both myself and the other Hellenes for our lack of discipline, as the night wore on and we did nothing to safeguard against the enemy attack certain to arrive with the morning's light. The troops were scattered randomly about the camp and the adjoining fields wherever they happened to have collapsed from fatigue and despair. Many expected simply to die in their sleep under the sharp hooves of the galloping Persians as they poured into our camp to finish off the destruction they had started. If we fell into the king's hands, we would most surely die, after being subject to terrible torture and cruelty. Hadn't the king cut off the head of his own stepbrother Cyrus, to be mounted on a pole and placed in front of his tent? And hadn't Tissaphernes flayed alive the very Greeks with whom he had feigned friendship just minutes before? No one was preparing for this eventuality. Indeed, there were few officers left in
the camp to give orders to the men, and those who had survived were as immobilized by fear and grief as the lowliest squire. I voiced my thoughts on these matters to Xenophon.

  Unable to return to sleep, he rose in the moonlight and walked about the vast, chaotic camp, stealthily waking and calling together Proxenus' squad leaders, most of whom were, themselves, resting only fitfully. They emerged filthy and bedraggled from the scattered shrubs and ditches where he found them, sometimes accompanied by a sleepy-eyed camp follower, though most were alone, having lost or given up contact with the troops for which they were responsible. They seemed grateful to have a reason to rise and begin moving about, even if at the request of one with no authority over them. When he finally succeeded in locating and collecting some twenty disheveled men in varying states of numbness and grief, he spoke quietly to them over the blazing fire I had built up.

  "It's impossible for me to sleep tonight, and I'm sure it's the same with you, for thinking about the king's forces. Ever since we defeated them at Cunaxa they have held off from attacking us, unless they saw a point of weakness. We allowed them to lead us away from their soft vitals, Babylon-we were only fifty miles away after Cunaxa!-and now we are in the middle of the wilderness, in the country of the Medes no less, and they have killed our leaders. That is the weakness they have been waiting for. They will be watching us from afar in the morning, through their spies and scouts, to see whether the murder of our officers has had the desired effect, and whether now is the time for them to destroy us once and for all.