The Ten Thousand (27 page)

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, just at sunset, as the army's scouts were returning to camp for the evening, I was startled to see Nicolaus emerge from the trees limping painfully, a grimace on his face. His arm was draped over the shoulders of another Rhodian who supported him in his painstaking walk out of the forest, and his right foot was tightly wrapped in a filthy rag torn from his tattered tunic. Despite the swaddling, he left a trail of blood on the earth behind him as he moved.

"Nicolaus, what happened?" I exclaimed, sprinting up and relieving his exhausted comrade of the burden. The loss of any of the Rhodians, whether to death or injury, would be a considerable blow to the army, but Nicolaus in particular, who was developing into a tactician of no mean skill and a valuable advisor to Xenophon, was to be protected at all costs. "Has there been an attack?"

Nicolaus grimaced again and rolled his eyes. "Only on me, for my own stupidity. I walked too close to a badger hole, and the fucker must have been waiting for me. He tore into my foot like a slab of raw meat, and locked his jaws on me. I had to club him to death with a stick, and then use another stick to pry his jaws. He took a chunk off my foot." Nicolaus' comrade proudly pulled the dead creature from a cloth bag slung over his shoulder, its head flattened and pulpy. It was the largest I had ever seen, the weight of a kid goat, with a row of evil, pointed teeth on its lower jaw that protruded around the bared lip in a hideous grin, still stained with Nicolaus' blood. "Can you help me into camp?" Nicolaus asked.

I could not yet tell how serious the injury might be, but any animal bite was notoriously prone to life-threatening fever, and if the badger had been rabid as well—best not to think about the consequences for now.

After draping his thin body carefully over my shoulders and carrying him to the Rhodians' campsite, I raced off to fetch Asteria, who had accumulated a large stash of medical supplies. I found her outside her tent, on her elbows and knees, her face almost touching the ground. She was struggling with the unaccustomed task of blowing on glowing embers to ignite a clumsily stacked pile of unseasoned branches she had gathered. I squatted beside her and spoke her name, startling her. She jumped and looked up, and then with a sheepish expression pushed herself up to a more dignified kneeling position, wiping stray strands of hair from her perspiring face. As she did so, she left a long, sooty finger-smudge across one cheek.

"Asteria, I need help with an injured man," I said. "Bring your medical supplies."

Returning with her to the Rhodians' camp a few minutes later, I pointed out the injured boy, while Nicolaus' comrades stood in awkward and deferential silence, unaccustomed to the presence of a woman in their midst.

Asteria did not shrink from the blood-soaked wrapping, but quickly and efficiently exposed the foot, calling for more light as she did so. As someone trained the glare from a torch directly on it, she muttered softly under her breath. "This is beyond my experience," she finally said. "Clean arrow wounds, broken bones, fevers I have handled, but this—" and she looked almost sadly down at Nicolaus' foot. I bent down myself to have a closer view, and sucked in my breath in dismay.

The limb had already swelled to twice its normal size, engulfing the toes, which emerged from the bulbous foot like tiny, newly sprouted buds on a tuber. Much of the skin had been torn off or hung in shreds, as if flayed with a dull knife, and a large piece of the inner heel was missing, just below the ankle, where I guessed the furious creature had clamped down in his final death throes. The foot was riddled with deep puncture marks where the beast had chewed and gnawed, seeking purchase—some had penetrated down to the bone.

Asteria gently palpated the instep, toes and ankle while Nicolaus writhed and moaned in pain, two of his colleagues pressing his shoulders flat to the ground and muttering reassurance to him.

"I don't think anything is broken," she said finally. "That is fortunate. The foot is a complicated limb and rarely heals properly after being set. I'm worried about this bite, though, and the punctures. This type of injury is ripe for gangrene. Once that sets in, the whole foot is lost—possibly even more."

Of this I was only too aware, for the sickly-sweet smell of rotting flesh which is symptomatic of this disease was a familiar one in the Greek camp.

Asteria hesitated, staring at the foot, before getting up and strolling impassively over to the nearest campfire, deep in thought. She knelt beside it, poking gently in the embers, pondering her next course of action. After a moment she stood up again, having apparently made a decision, and returned, her eyes avoiding Nicolaus' sweating, inquiring face.

"Sit on his knee, Theo," she commanded in a low voice, "and hold his shin tight. Don't let his foot move." I jumped to the task, eager for something useful to do, and no sooner had I seized the bony shin and calf than she withdrew from behind her back the knife she was holding, which she had brought to a pulsing, red-hot glow in the coals. Kneeling quickly, she pressed the flat of the glowing blade hard against the enormous bite in the flesh of the foot, eliciting a loud sizzling sound from the steaming wound, as of fat dripping from a roasting flank into the fire. The sharp, acrid stench of burning flesh assaulted my nostrils as fiercely as it had when the flaming naphtha had seared the attacking Persians at Cunaxa.

For a moment Nicolaus was silent, perhaps in shock, or during that brief, merciful delay between the touch of burning metal to one's skin and the blinding white explosion of pain that bursts in one's head. Then he erupted into a desperate, sustained howl, a cry of rage and pain that shocked and silenced the rest of the camp, as men for hundreds of yards around stopped what they were doing to listen. His scream died down to a gasping choke as his lungs became depleted, but resumed again as Asteria turned the blade over to the other, still red-hot side and again pressed its sizzling flatness into the now crispened wound. The bleeding ceased almost immediately, and was now reduced to a quiet, insignificant oozing. She gazed at her handiwork in satisfaction. "Almost done, now," she whispered to Nicolaus soothingly, though whatever comfort he may have derived from these words was blotted out when he saw her step back to the fire to plunge her blade again into the coals.

Returning a moment later, she this time gently inserted the red-hot tip into each puncture wound, rotating the searing blade slowly to cauterize all sides of the holes. Nicolaus was passing in and out of consciousness from the excruciating pain, and when lucid, he was reduced to a despairing, breathless whimper.

The ghastly treatment was over as quickly as it had begun, though not soon enough for those of us watching in horrified fascination. Removing a long needle and a length of gut from her kit, she quickly and efficiently sutured the flaps of skin she found hanging freely from around the ankle and instep, and then rummaging again through her bag, found a small ceramic jar sealed with a piece of oiled fabric tied tightly around the top. Opening this up, she dipped in her fingers and swabbed Nicolaus' entire foot, both inside the wounds and out, with a greasy, foul-smelling balm that appeared to give the ashen-faced boy some relief. She then wrapped the entire limb in clean gauze up to the knee, tied it off tightly, and stood up, wiping her hands dry on her hips.

"Theo," she said, in a low voice of authority, "find him some uncut wine to help him sleep. I'll check on him in the morning and change the dressing. If we can stave off fever for three days he'll recover without loss."

I rushed off to take some wine from Xenophon's private store, which he used for libations during the sacrifices, and returned to find Asteria chatting quietly with several of the Rhodian boys, each of whom was asking her about their own wounds and ailments. Asteria patiently answered their queries as best she could, but I could see from her face that she was drained and exhausted, and I gently led her away from the grateful slingers, and sleeping Nicolaus.

Walking quietly back to the camp followers' quarters, we paused near a high hedge to rest. I was deeply impressed with her work on Nicolaus, and told her as much, but she wearily waved off my compliments.

"I learned about treating foot injuries from some notes left at the palace years ago by Democedes of Croton," she said, "but it was your countryman Hippocrates who perfected the cauterizing technique. I never had the courage to try it, until now. The pain is terrible, but short-lived. Thank the gods it was only his foot. It could have been much worse."

"Worse? His foot was in shreds!"

"True, but Hippocrates recommends the technique for treating hemorrhoids."

I recoiled, and she rolled her eyes at my squeamishness. "Theo, please, let us talk of something else. My spirit needs distracting."

I was not sure what she wished to discuss, but my mind immediately ventured to a question that had been gnawing at me for weeks, afraid to hear the answer from her for fear it might cause her to reconsider her own motives.

"Asteria, you had hardly even spoken to me before. What possessed you to steal into my tent in Cunaxa?"

She looked at me in surprise. "Because I am Lydian, of course," she said.

This response failed to penetrate, which she gathered from my silence.

"Of course, I was born in Miletus," she explained, which only confused me further. "Miletus has been under Lydian rule for centuries, but my mother traces her lineage directly from King Croesus, so I consider myself Lydian, even though the Persians insisted on calling me 'the Milesian.'"

I was thoroughly baffled by now, which seemed to flummox her.

"I'm surprised at you," she said, in exasperation.

"Then we're even," I answered. "I've known Lydians all my life—Athens is full of them—but I've never known one to grant me the favors you did, simply because you were born a Lydian!" I winked, but she ignored, or failed to notice, the jesting tone in my voice.

"Have you ever read Archilochus of Paros?" she asked, her eyebrows raised.

Naturally I had read the old Parian, back when Xenophon and I were schoolboys, but I had retained precious little, and indeed I had to confess that I had understood even less at the time I had read him. To me, his lyric poetry was of the densest sort.

"And you call us barbarians," she said dismissively. "Athenians seem to think that unless their history comes spoon-fed in simple prose straight from Herodotus, it can't be worth listening to."

The conversation had now shifted to a topic with which I was familiar. "Herodotus was a great man," I asserted, straightening my back and raising my chin at this rare chance to demonstrate my superior knowledge. "I once even met the master personally, when I was a young boy and he a very old man—though you can't imagine a crustier old gaffer than he was, and one less likely to attract the favors of a Lydian wench." I pinched her playfully on the haunches but she swatted my hand away.

"Well, since you are such a
cultured
Athenian," she retorted sarcastically, "you certainly know Herodotus' chronicle of King Candaules of Lydia."

"Of course, but I still dispute your characterization of Herodotus..."

"Would you care for me to recite Archilochus' verse form of the tale? Then you may be better capable of judging the prose of your own leaden-tongued hero."

Ignoring her dismissal of the education and culture I had struggled so hard to acquire at Xenophon's side, I took the bait and happily agreed to the recitation. She launched effortlessly into the polished iambic trimeter that Archilochus employed only for his most salacious verse, though from her lips it sounded as pure as a prayer. I would be wholly incapable of transcribing here her perfectly modulated pitch and crystalline vocalizing—it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to accurately render the speech of a superior one, especially fifty years into one's dotage. I will therefore limit myself to recalling it to the best of my ability in the thick Attic prose Asteria so disdained, but with which my pedestrian Muses have cursed me.

"You know, of course, that Candaules was madly, passionately in love with his wife," she began. "He was a very fortunate man, for if the gods ordain both that a man fall in love, which happens often, and that he love the very person with whom they ordain he is to spend the rest of his life, which happens only rarely, then that man is indeed blessed. And Candaules was thrice blessed, in that he also believed that his wife was the most beautiful woman in the world. It is just such an overabundance of fortune that leads the gods to take notice, and to pound in the nail whose head extends higher than the rest."

She paused to look at me, confirming that I was paying close attention, then continued.

"Candaules had one bodyguard, Gyges, whom he favored above all others, and to whom he confided all his affairs, even his most intimate thoughts; and Gyges never once betrayed his master's confidence. He was loyal to a fault. Candaules often rapturously described his wife's beauty and voluptuousness to Gyges," and breaking out of character and rhythm, Asteria added, "though you know better than I do what men talk about to each other when alone."

I felt the blood rising to my face and began heatedly denying that men discuss any such things with each other, but she rolled her eyes dismissively at me and continued.

"One day, while they were discussing Candaules' favorite topic, he remarked that Gyges did not seem to believe the claims he made of his wife's physical perfection. 'Since the truth is more persuasive to men's eyes than to their ears,' he said, 'I will find a way for you to see her naked, and then you will be convinced of what I say, not only with regard to her beauty, but to her other talents as well.'

"Naturally, Gyges was appalled at this suggestion, as any honorable man would be. 'What are you saying, master?' he said. 'You wish me to see your wife naked? Believe me, I know you are telling the truth when you say there is no woman on earth with a body like hers. But I was taught by my father to distinguish between right and wrong. Don't ask me to do evil merely to confirm what I already know is true. I would rather you blinded me.'