That night, the entire army camped silently in grief for wives and children not even theirs, in the small enclosure of the flat mountain top. When I stole away from my duties to seek out Asteria, I had difficulty finding her. After searching for a time among the Rhodians' camp, I finally asked Nicolaus discreetly if he had an idea as to her whereabouts, and he pointed me in the direction of the cliff face behind the camp.
I soon found her, wedged into a dark gap between two large boulders, overlooking the site where the Taochian women had dashed themselves and their children onto the rocks. The sides and bottom of the cliff were now lit by flickering shadows cast by the enormous funeral pyre built below by the Cretan mountaineers whom Xenophon had assigned to collecting and burning the bodies and arranging for an appropriate marking. Asteria looked drawn, and acted nervous and uncommunicative.
"I brought you something," I said, trying to inject a note of consolation into my voice. I paused, waiting for a reaction that did not come, and unable to think what else to say I unwrapped from an oilcloth rag a bit of stale bread dipped in honey, which had been one of her favorite treats on the march. What simple things now satisfied her, after the rich existence she had once lived.
Asteria winced when she saw the food, and turning suddenly I heard her retch into a small cavity in the rock behind her, gasping for breath when she was done and then slowly turning around again to face me. From the close smell I noticed when I sat beside her, I realized she had been in here for some time.
She looked at me in a way that reflected, if not outright dislike, something only slightly more than indifference and far less than I had expected. She quickly composed her features into an expressionless mask, but the barren glance I had seen in that instant before she did so had said everything. I sat in silence, gazing out into the darkness.
"I'm not well, Theo," she finally murmured. "My belly is churning. Female problems." She cringed involuntarily when my shoulder brushed against hers, as if her skin had become overly sensitive, as after a severe sunburn.
I wrapped the bread and offered to bring her something more soothing. "Soup? The Rhodians have just killed a goat and are boiling it up…"
Asteria blanched and turned her head away. Again I remained silent, wondering what words I should use, then finally decided to simply unburden myself, for with her I had said everything, and had nothing left to hide.
"Asteria, I've accepted your services to the Rhodians. I've acknowledged your skills. I've violated my duty to the army for you, destroyed a fellow Greek for you. Yet still you shrink from me-are you truly so burdened by this betrayal of your father? I need to understand."
She paused for a long time, and I struggled to see her eyes and face in the growing shadows cast by the rocks in which she sat. Her voice came from far away, so softly I had to lean forward to hear, and she spoke almost without moving her dry, cracked lips.
"I'm far beyond concerns of my father. I mortally betrayed him and could never return to him. He knows what I've done, he's cursed me, and he's punished me by proxy, through the deaths of those close to me."
"Who? How do you know these things if he is not here? How can he even know of such a betrayal, or you of his punishment?"
"You cannot see the distant sniper in the dark, yet you feel his silent intent when the arrow buries itself in your throat. You cannot see the plague, yet you witness men swelling and turning black. So it is with my father."
I peered at her again in puzzlement. Still unable to make out her expression, I extended my hand to touch her face, thinking perhaps she herself was suffering from a fever, wondering at the changes I had seen in her recently. She shook my hand off in irritation with a brief wince as if from some deep pain.
"Theo, I don't expect you to understand-but I must be alone right now, rather than in the company of… men. I'll be fine for the march tomorrow."
I nodded. How can anyone know what passes in the hearts of women? They are more fickle even than the gods. Though Zeus is lord of Olympus, who is it that rules his actions, if not Hera and her rivals? As I began picking my way back down the path to the encampment, I turned back once more to look at her. She had already returned to her own thoughts, pushed me far from her mind, as if my feeble attempt at reconciliation had never taken place. I was struck by the fragility of her thin, bare legs extended in front of her without so much as a blanket for warmth, by the vulnerability of her defeated posture, in sharp contrast to the shorn hair and rough tunic of a Rhodian slinger.
In the light of the pyre, I saw in her face an ineffable sadness, even a longing, as she gazed down at the burial party tending to the dead mothers and babies below the cliff, and I watched as with tense and tormented fingers she clutched at her own burning belly.
BOOK ELEVEN
WHEEL OF FATE
For two urns stand upon the floor of Zeus's palace
Which hold his gifts to us, the one filled with evils, the other blessings.
When Zeus Lord of Thunder mixes his gifts between the two,
A man meets now with good fortune, now with ill.
But when Zeus bestows gifts from the jar of sorrow only,
That man becomes a pariah-cruel famine and madness
Pursue him to the ends of the earth,
And he wanders without aim, damned by gods and men alike.
– HOMER
CHAPTER ONE
BLIND HABIT WAS the only reason we were able to continue moving day after day, the only explanation for being able to endure and even ignore horrors which, in earlier times, would have thrown us into despair. Ignore, yes-but not forget. We forgot nothing. So long as we kept moving, surrendering ourselves to habit, we could push our wretchedness and the constant presence of death and disease to the backs of our minds. Fear can be endured if it is blunted and beaten into the dull form of a habit. But if we ever allow it to emerge, to take the keen edge of its true form, it will kill us as surely as a Scythian blade. The army had fought its way step by step through hostile territory for almost five months since Cyrus' death at Cunaxa, and by now we had settled into a routine, though one of resignation rather than inclination. Morale had stabilized at a sullen, resentful but dutiful level. Each day the men simply trudged in silence, pushing from their mind all thoughts but that of surviving to the end of the day, stepping up their pace and lifting their sight only when necessary to defend themselves against attack, an almost daily occurrence. Finally, however, the weather began to break, with whole hours, then days on end when the weak sun strengthened sufficiently to begin melting the snow, and the icicles glittering on the stunted trees dropped their essence lazily, almost reluctantly, into slushy pools below. The wind, though still biting as it whipped through the narrow defiles and mountain passes, now carried a subtle scent of new vegetation, and of clean moisture rather than of sterile, frozen death. Descending out of the mountains we marched a hundred and fifty miles in a week, contending each step of the way with the Chalybians, a vicious tribe that was prepared, even eager, for hand-to-hand combat against our emaciated forces. The tribesmen wore linen corselets reaching to the groin, as well as greaves and stout helmets, unlike any of the other tribes we had seen. They carried enormous spears, and in their belt long daggers like the Spartans. We lost dozens of men to their lightning-swift raids and attacks before at last we were able to repel them in one of the many battles which have now become too tiresome for me to recount.
We were told by our guides that the sea, and safety, was scarcely more than two hundred miles distant, half a month's march, though Xenophon was reluctant to give credit to this information and unnecessarily raise the hopes of the exhausted troops. Word nevertheless spread rapidly that we were approaching our final stage, and the men's pace perceptibly quickened, their limping seemed to recover somewhat, and they carried their shields with slightly more aplomb.
And then we came to the River.
The recent snowmelt had raised the icy waters of the Harpasos to a level far too high for a safe c
rossing. After all the rivers we had successfully crossed in the past half year, this flow, which was not even shown on the crude maps devised for us by our seers, stopped us dead in our tracks. The silt in the water was so thick it was impossible even to determine the river's depth. Xenophon sent scouts on horseback in both directions to try to identify a passable ford, and by sunset both parties had returned. The team that had scouted south failed to find a crossing, and in fact reported that the river was joined by another tributary several miles downstream, widening it further and rendering it even more dangerous. The squad that had traveled north was slightly more fortunate, having encountered a hunting party of local Chalybian tribesmen, whom they had quickly run down and pressed into service.
Their leader was a morose and surly individual, a hunter with the unlikely name of Charon, who was familiar with the river and agreed under duress to guide us to a point he said would be passable, though not without a certain degree of difficulty. With Charon guiding the main party, the heavy troops slashed their way upstream for two days over rocky ground and through brushy ravines. Xenophon trailed behind with a smaller contingent of light-armed troops to protect our rear and what little provisions remained in the limping wagons and sleds. Finally arriving at Charon's objective, we saw that the water still appeared as fast and as deep as before, though the man swore that here it could be traversed by the army, with proper precautions. Gazing due west in the direction we were to ford, the low sun had turned the sky blood red, reflecting its hellish color into the murky water and the yellowish foam of the rapids, and my stomach knotted. I again felt the massed, unintelligible chanting and dark, minor chords of the Syracusan chorus surging up from my bowels, like magma throbbing underground, threatening to burst.
The hills on this side of the river were heavily wooded, and while half the troops made camp, collected firewood, and threw up defensive palisades and trenching, Xenophon ordered the rest to venture into the forest to cut light trees and lash them together for rafts. He had no illusions that we would be able to build a sufficient number of vessels for all the men and beasts-most of them would have to make do with their soon-to-be-developed swimming and floating skills-yet still, he hoped that with at least a few rafts we would be able to ferry across some of the wounded and most of our supplies, without further endangering our own lives.
For three days we were occupied in this task, under intermittently pouring and freezing rain that caused the river to swell even higher. Those among the soldiers who could not swim, which is to say most, kept to their work with a grim determination, though even tough Spartans, who would not hesitate to leap into pitched battle against a charging Scythian horseman, were as nervous as children at the thought of crossing the raging torrent they now faced. Spartans are land creatures and hate water crossings, though by this point of our journey one might have thought they would be accustomed to them. This roaring, murderous flow, however, carried in its silt the fear and fury of unknown lands hundreds of miles upstream, the ice and mystery of uninhabitable regions, perhaps even fearsome creatures and strange gods lurking beneath its surface. A man at the age I was then, burning with life, can normally no more foresee or contemplate his death than he can the lives of his descendants a thousand or two thousand years in the future. If death were to overtake him, it would be a complete surprise, unanticipated, with hardly a thought or reflection as to its meaning or impact. During those three days of staring at the river, however, I aged fifty years, and devoted as much thought to my death as I do now in my old age, when surrounded by it I can hardly escape reflecting on it. On the appointed day the weather had cleared somewhat, but the skies still glowered. The seers sacrificed the two youngest sheep still remaining to us, in lieu of the lambs that would have been more pleasing to the river gods, slitting their throats so that the blood would flow into the water. Without waiting even for the priests to divine the gods' response, or perhaps purposely ignoring it out of fear, Xenophon ordered Charon to lead the first flotilla of small ferries across, each stacked high with our precious grain, the arms and armor remaining to us, a few bleating sheep and the terrified wounded men. The sides of the rafts were held fast by soldiers, those who could swim grasping the downstream side and shouting encouragement to those who could not swim, who were pressed by the current, panic-stricken, against the upstream sides of the rafts, praying to the gods for strength to be able to maintain their grip in the icy water. I had heard as a child that smearing the body with oil would help a swimmer retain body heat, so after quietly reminding Xenophon of this, he ordered the precious oil casks opened, which we had been carrying for anointing the dead, and every man was given a cup of it with which to coat his body. Each swimmer had small sections of split logs strapped precariously to his chest and back, in an effort to keep him afloat if he became separated from the raft, at least long enough to be washed ashore downstream before he died of cold or drowning.
As was their custom, the soldiers entered the water naked, save only their sandals, and each carried a silver coin or two, what little they had left from their last stipends, held in their cheeks for safekeeping. Chirisophus joked grimly that this measure would also save the survivors the expense of placing an obol in the mouths of the dead to pay their final toll, if the crossing was not successful. As the first rafts and soldiers entered the water, those on shore watched the progress of their comrades with hope, then busied themselves with their own preparations.
About a third of the army had entered the river, with the vanguard three-quarters of the way across, when a frantic clamor arose from the craft just behind Charon's, and we looked up to see the vessel standing almost vertically on its side, the torrent rushing up against it on the upstream side and forming a wall of froth, with the arms and legs of an upstream solder flitting out here and there as he struggled to maintain his grasp. On the downstream side the raft was braced firmly against a huge boulder unseen before in the rapids, but now visible behind the half dozen men standing hip-deep in the frigid water. They clumsily wrenched the raft back and forth, their strapped logs hindering them at every step, frantically trying to force it out of the jam. Another raft was quickly bearing down upon them, with its retinue of bobbing heads along three sides shouting in panic and attempting unsuccessfully to steer away from the boulder. The second raft, caught in the same vicious current, slammed into the first, both of them splintering like children's toys, overturning the provisions, and sending thirty men screaming into free-float in the frigid river, grasping at boulders, raft fragments and each other as they were swept downstream out of sight.
Even at this distance I could see the horrified look on Charon's face as he watched part of the army he claimed he could safely guide across the river disappear downstream without a trace. He frantically signaled to those in the water to stop their wading across the river, and to move directly upstream a hundred yards, to avoid the treacherous boulder that had destroyed the two rafts. We could all see the logic to this solution, yet those already in the water had been there for some time now, their bodies had become numb from the chest down and some were experiencing convulsions. The thought of remaining in the water for the additional time the detour would take was almost too much to bear. Those still on land quickly ran upstream to the newly designated crossing point, dragging the wagons and supplies with them, and then the soldiers slated to cross next strode into the water toward their predecessors, tossing them short ropes, blankets, branches, anything they could find to help their frozen comrades cover the last stretch.
When the entire army had shifted upstream to the new crossing point, we noted that Charon had unloaded his craft on the far side, and with several of the strongest swimmers from the troops had again entered the river and was returning toward the bulk of the army, swearing in his incomprehensible barbarian tongue and pulling into the ferry any soldiers he encountered midstream who were on the verge of going under.
Despite his efforts, a dozen more men were lost, as were two more rafts with their
priceless cargo of supplies, while crossing the river.
Men straggled into camp on the other side for the next two days, naked and blue with cold, their feet bleeding from the icy and thorny ground on which they had walked miles from the point they had made landfall, others dragging broken limbs battered from the thrashing they had taken against the river boulders or the rafts themselves. Not a man was without serious bruises, myself included, and we remained in camp for three days nursing our wounds and trying to warm our frozen bodies, while search parties were dispatched downstream on both sides in an effort to find any further survivors who might have lost their way. One of the search parties never returned, and we guessed its fate from the gleeful taunts of the fur-clad tribesmen who mockingly waved their spears at us from across the river on the second night of our stay. In return for Charon's dubious services and inept guidance Chirisophus ordered that his head be removed and sent across by a catapult improvised from a springy young sapling, to his jabbering compatriots on the other side of the river. After they had retrieved the carefully padded bundle from where it had landed on the river bank and examined it, they set up an outraged chorus of lamentations and insults, but in the end, troubled us no more.
That night I slipped off alone under a moon as livid and cold as the eye of a blind man, wrapped in a borrowed wolfskin, spurning or spurned by Asteria, as I had been for weeks. I walked until I came upon a vast, barren plain covered with low plant growth. I had no fear of the darkness, that glowering sky of the Homeric epics, for there was no greater night than the darkness I felt inside me. As I walked, my chest constricted with a long-suppressed shudder, and I breathed deeply, taking in the redolent night air. Of all the scents most capable of eliciting emotion and memory-the smoke of a wood fire, a woman's sleep-warm body under a blanket, chalk on a child's tablet-there is perhaps none so simultaneously comforting and threatening as the scent of the moon. The scent of the moon. I ask the reader to reflect, to turn inward and carefully, slowly, inhale the still night air: one cannot help but notice that the night's scent is different by moonlight. The moon comforts in the light that it sheds on the darkness, yet threatens by emphasizing that very darkness and the mystery that still remains in the shadows beyond the moon's reach. Even a blind man unable to perceive light is confident in noting that the moon is shining, and will feel simultaneously both an inner comfort and a sense of foreboding at this knowledge. It is really only a question of breathing.
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